Arabian Nights: Volume One - The Restless Ones. (15.)
Directed by Miguel Gomes.
Starring Miguel Gomes, Carloto Cotta, Crista Alfaiate, Adriano luz and Rogerio Samara. Portuguese with subtitles. 125 mins.
This is a long film, six hours across its three parts. (A colon AND a hyphen in a single title – that must be some kind of first; and it isn't even a sequel.) There are many long films but not so many long films that start with its director declaring it to be a bad idea. The bad idea is to try to express some real stories of misery suffered in austerity-crushed Portugal between August 2013 and July 2014 through the filter of a loose reworking of the Arabian Nights. The result is a strange, not wholly satisfactory hotch potch of magic realism and social document.
The film's opening half hour is spent trying and, by its own admission, failing to find a connection between the closure of the country's biggest shipyard and an invasion of African wasps that are killing off the local bees and the dependent honey business. Only then does it move on to the Arabian Nights. The first Tale, The Men with Hard-Ons, mixes contemporary situations with elements from the Arabian Nights in a satire of the country's leaders' dealings with the Troika of bankers, EU and IMF that control it, that is both silly yet fierce. The rest of the film is more documentary based, often just ordinary people telling their hard luck stories straight to camera, but with the occasional surreal inventive flourishes.
If I were one of those people I'm not sure how I would feel about this film: would I be grateful that my experiences were being presented to people or irritated that it was then getting obfuscated into an obscure and, let's be honest, quite elitist, slightly dull art film? One thing though the film does achieve is the way it expresses the rage and hopeless felt by the Portuguese people. Gomes may be right about his film being a bad idea and no matter how much he tries to jumble things up, put his artist stamp on things, the despair comes through loud and clear and that is the project's saving grace. Volumes 2 and 3 are out in the next two weeks and will be available on MUBI
Directed by Miguel Gomes.
Starring Miguel Gomes, Carloto Cotta, Crista Alfaiate, Adriano luz and Rogerio Samara. Portuguese with subtitles. 125 mins.
This is a long film, six hours across its three parts. (A colon AND a hyphen in a single title – that must be some kind of first; and it isn't even a sequel.) There are many long films but not so many long films that start with its director declaring it to be a bad idea. The bad idea is to try to express some real stories of misery suffered in austerity-crushed Portugal between August 2013 and July 2014 through the filter of a loose reworking of the Arabian Nights. The result is a strange, not wholly satisfactory hotch potch of magic realism and social document.
The film's opening half hour is spent trying and, by its own admission, failing to find a connection between the closure of the country's biggest shipyard and an invasion of African wasps that are killing off the local bees and the dependent honey business. Only then does it move on to the Arabian Nights. The first Tale, The Men with Hard-Ons, mixes contemporary situations with elements from the Arabian Nights in a satire of the country's leaders' dealings with the Troika of bankers, EU and IMF that control it, that is both silly yet fierce. The rest of the film is more documentary based, often just ordinary people telling their hard luck stories straight to camera, but with the occasional surreal inventive flourishes.
If I were one of those people I'm not sure how I would feel about this film: would I be grateful that my experiences were being presented to people or irritated that it was then getting obfuscated into an obscure and, let's be honest, quite elitist, slightly dull art film? One thing though the film does achieve is the way it expresses the rage and hopeless felt by the Portuguese people. Gomes may be right about his film being a bad idea and no matter how much he tries to jumble things up, put his artist stamp on things, the despair comes through loud and clear and that is the project's saving grace. Volumes 2 and 3 are out in the next two weeks and will be available on MUBI
