TABU World Cinema

TABU is a highly stylized dream of a film. The film takes its name from the F.W. Murnau and Robert Flaherty 1931 silent classic TABU: A STORY OF THE SOUTH SEAS and is similarly an epic colonial romance. However, in Miguel Gomes’ TABU, the romantic ideals of colonial history are juxtaposed against a moral ineptitude that penetrates the cloistered colonial world of African servants, garden parties, rifles, difficult childbirths and tropical diseases – and leads to despair and moral and physical deaths that are small and large. The film is a haunting and beautiful homage to tragic love, as seen through the eyes of a hungry crocodile, set to a soundtrack of Portuguese versions of Phil Spector. From Lisbon to Mount Tabu, the remote outpost of the Portuguese motherland, the film is a dazzling black and white spectacle that shows us the promise and potential that Gomes holds as a director.