Film audiences are acquainted with Portuguese films mainly through works by the legendary director Manoelo de Oliveir and films by the representatives of the so-called new film of the 1960’s, such as those by Paulo Rocha. However, during the last two decades Portuguese films have come to be in the center of European and international attention and at the start of the new autumn season, this intriguing cinema is represented with two programs.
The first part consist of the selection of films from the NY Portuguese Short Film Festival 2017, including feature films A Instalação do Medo (2016), Cargo (2017), Quarto em Lisboa (2016) and Tu (2016), documentaries Alvanéu (2015), Manuel (2015) and O Entalhador ou A Oficina Mais Bela do Mundo (2017), animated films Foi o Fio (2014) and Nevjerojatan obični čovjek (2016), and the musical video Ribbon Tooth (2017), as well as the “guest” film of the festival, feature film Um Dia Longo (2011).
However, a special curiosity is the second part of the program that includes the trilogy Arabian Nights (2015) by the director Miguel Gomes. Right now, besides Pedro Costa, this former film critic is the most esteemed Portuguese director. He became an international star of contemporary art film with his films Aquele Querido Mês de Agosto (2008) and Tabu (2012). Arabian Nights is a six-hour long mosaic consisting of three two-hours long films in which the director portrays events in his home country during the turbulent period between August 2013 and July 2014 caused by the economic recession and fiscal crisis after the European financial institutions imposed austerity measures on the country. Nevertheless, as is noted on the titles at the beginning of each film, these are not literal adaptations of the Persian myth about the storyteller Scheherazade, but it rather serves as an inspiration for the film’s narrative structure and a model for combining the disparate and diverse stories.
The first part of the trilogy, Arabian Nights: The Restless One, begins with the documentary prologue about the downfall of the Portuguese shipyard and laying off of its workers. It is interspersed with the story about the dying bees whose honeycombs were ruined by imported hornets, and finally it shows the director himself who identifies similarities between the two stories and realizes that he does not know how to connect them. He finally runs away from his own film set like a real coward. Therefore this task falls on the fictional protagonist, the witty daughter of the grand Vizier. Every night she entertains the ruler with stories that she stops at the most intriguing moment in order to buy herself one more night before he kills her.
The first story, The Men With Hard-Ons, is an absurd vignette about European big shots who vent their frustrations because of erectile dysfunction on Portuguese debtors. They finally stop strangling them when a magician cures their impotence. Next story, The Cockerel and the Fire, is about a rooster who is on trial because of crowing too early. When the case becomes famous he wins a large number of votes at a local election. The first part ends with the documentary story The Swim of the Magnificents, an interview between members of the syndicate and four people who talk about unemployment before the traditional swimming in the Atlantic Ocean on New Year’s Eve. Meanwhile their mayor deals with the problem of a beached whale.
As opposed to the first part that openly talks about how Portuguese economy destroyed the working class, the second part of the trilogy, Arabian Nights: The Desolate One, brings us a somewhat more personal view of the life in contemporary Portugal. It begins with the story entitled Chronicle of the Escape of Simao, about a man who murdered his wife, daughter and two women, and in spite of that and due to a successful escape from the police, became a national hero. The second story, The Tears of the Judge, is a burlesque set in a courtroom full of bizarre characters and shows how a judge is trying to determine the causal chain of events that led to the crime. She soon finds out that she is facing an impossible task because all the people connected to the case are guilty of something. Finally, the third story, entitled The Owners of Dixie, is about a Maltese dog named Dixie who keeps changing owners in a big apartment complex and thus becomes witness to the state of mind of people in time of crisis.
Unlike the two previous parts, the third part of the trilogy, Arabian Nights: The Enchanted One, at first takes us to the abundance of ancient Baghdad and places Scheherazade herself in the focus. She runs out of inspiration and sets off on a journey during which she meets her farther and other unusual characters. Her adventures are followed by another story set in modern Portugal that is entitled The Inebriating Chorus of the Chaffinches and is about people who train their birds for a bird singing competition. Suddenly the self-standing feature documentary about this subculture of people with an unusual hobby, is interrupted by the story Hot Forest, about a love adventure of a Chinese student in Portugal, portrayed through her shameless commentary contrasted with the pictures of mass protests.
As may be anticipated from the summaries, the trilogy Arabian Nights is a hybrid film that resists genre classification. It is characterized by many features of Gomes’ opus – peculiarity, imagination, eccentricity, episodic and fragmented narrative structure, violation of narrative conventions, playing with levels of time, intertwining of factual and documentary with the imaginary and fictional, tragic with the comical, serious with the absurd, literal with the metaphoric, as well as mixing of genres, styles and techniques, selection of bizarre themes, surreal symbols, eclectic soundtrack, visual impressiveness and many other things. Without any doubt, this trilogy is an inventive piece of film work; it represents one of the more important experiments of the last decade and a highly modernist film that, besides the aforementioned formal challenging (obvious also in the abundant use of subtitles and the very original “index” at the end of the film), contains also a political challenging. However, it should be mentioned that this almost crazy, Gargantuan-like ambitious allegorical political saga, in spite of indisputably being offbeat and its attempt to weave a tapestry of social reality and cruelty of the economic politics of contemporary Portugal, it is in the end a film that is sometimes somewhat repetitive, drawn out, slow in rhythm and without a clear path forward.
Nevertheless, the trilogy that held the high fourth place on the list of best films of the year by the influential film magazine Sight and Sound, should definitely be watched. Only then can we decide whether it is a film that is more easily admired than loved, and whether Gomes – just like “his” Scheherazade – managed to keep the attention of the audience or rather “lost his film life” on “the very first night” i.e. after the first part of his brave and imaginative although at times somewhat pretentious magnum opus. (Marko Rojnić)