Not having seen the three part epic in its complete form, I’m still a
bit apprehensive about writing about the first part, the first volume, of
Miguel Gomes’ grand opus, Arabian Nights.
The choice to divide and distribute the epic in three volumes is, doubtlessly,
a commercially sound choice, while also allowing the film to have a broader
audience that would tremble at the possibility of watching a six hour film.
While I understand this, it still feel as if I need to watch the complete film
before offering my thoughts on any of the volumes. But, since that will most
likely not happen and the last volume will only be available in October, let’s
throw caution to the wind and explore some of my thoughts on the first volume,
having in mind that in the future, after watching the entirety of Arabian Nights, my opinion may have
changed considerably.
The film, which recently arrived at Portuguese
cinemas, brings with itself an impressive baggage of social, political and
artistic expectations as well as undeniable international prestige. Premiered
at the Director’s Fortnight at this year’s Cannes Film Festival and awarded
both in Australia and Poland, the film has been revealing itself as one of the
most ambitious works of cinema this year, showing a political rage and intense
satire that, to me, seems to have been slowly dissipating from most of European
cinema in the past few decades.
The ambition of Arabian Nights, which is a sort of epic of the current economic and
social crisis, is undoubtedly monumental. And, when speaking of ambition, I’m
speaking of both its narrative and volatile thematic content as well as its
awe-inspiring form and structure. Example, the beginning of the film looks at the
closing of the shipyards in Viana do Castelo, approaching its subject with a
perspective that is both documentary-like and lyrical. The audience watches
disperse images, gritty and raw while being beautiful as masterfully filmed by
Sayombhu Mukdeeprom (usual DP of Apichatpong Weerasethakull), joined by a
constant voice-over of the now unemployed workers. Simultaneous to these images
of Viana do Castelo, we have a parallel story, an Asiatic wasp invasion that is
devastating the native bees. The struggle to eliminate the invaders also
contributes some of the most beautiful images Ive seen in cinemas all year,
showing the burning of a hive during the night, filling the darkness with a
rain of fiery sparks.
The director, an inescapable presence in the
first chapters, states that he can’t come up with a connection between the two different
elements of these initial moments, which seems to be a bit disingenuous. A
foreign threat entering Portugal and causing the destruction its indigenous
population doesn’t seem to be particularly difficult to metaphorically relate
to the film’s political intentions. The director apparent confusion is,
however, one of the greatest facets of the film, culminating in the scene where
Gomes appears on screen running away from his crew and from his film. The
creative crisis joined by the social and economic crisis and in this torrent of
desperation genius is born, the structure of the rest of the film is born. But
it’s not directness and clarity what emerges from this genius, but another
path, one of glorious ridicule and absurdist narrative.
The structure and method of the remaining film
have already been widely discusses, both nationally and internationally, but,
basically, Gomes employed the help of journalists that would collect several
news stories from across the country during a period of 12 months, thus
providing material for the episodic structure that utilizes the character of
Scheherazade from One Thousand and One
Nights, The storyteller first materializes in an oneiric chapter about the
virgins of Bagdad, here standing for the journalists that helped Gomes, who
supply the Arabic queen with stories, which we watch throughout the following
chapters of the film. Tales, satirical and crass, filled with a strange social
realism occasionally peppered with fantasy and biblical tonalities.
The first volume offers three tales, “The Men
with Hard-Ons”, “The Story of the Cockerel and the Fire” and “The Bath of the
Magnificents”. In the first of these tales we have a political satire, in which
Portuguese politicians, amongst them the Prime Minister (Rogério Samora),
receive a group of implacable foreigners and try to negotiate the economic
measures to be imposed on the Portuguese people. In the midst of this, we have
a magical man from the French colonies in Africa, a spray that produces
otherworldly erections, and a parade of disgusting behaviours and decisions
that demonstrate a frightening distancing between the country’s current social
calamity and the incompetent power games played by the European politicians.
The humour is crass and grotesque, the satire couldn’t be more obvious, there’s
an undeniable rage behind each second of the episode, and all of this is
presented in a glorious torrent of ridicule.
The second story features a cockerel in
Resende, which by singing in the middle of the night provokes the anger of the
community, resulting in the animal being put on trial. If the first tale is am
acidic political satire portrayed by actors that are relatively famous (in
Portugal), this one is a delicious absurdist comedy with a deceptively sweet
love story between pre-teens, which is revealed to an animal talking judge
during the prophetic cockerel’s trial. All of this with non-actors and complete
unknowns in contrast with the cast of “Hard-Ons”.
The protagonist of the third tale is a tired
and depressed syndicalist (Adriano Luz). He tries to organize the first bath of
2014, an old traditional o the region, among a community drowned in the misery
brought upon by the closing of the shipyards. Three times we watch real-life
unemployed people of the community talk about their predicament, filmed in long
takes and deliberately slow paced. This last tale is thus filled with a
suffocating sense of despair that is impossible to shake off, while also
including images of biblical undertones like a beached whale that explodes
during one of the protagonist’s dreams, who, in such settings, reveals himself
as a sort of suffering Job living through the Portuguese crisis.
Such a chaptered structure, as I’ve previously
mentions in past reviews, brings with it the particular problem of enticing an
audience to compare the separated episodes instead of appreciating the film as
a whole. Throughout the film there’s an interesting progression, especially
regarding humour. Comparing the three tales, there’s a gradation starting with
crass and unavoidable satire, progressing into a pervasive melancholy in the
love story retold by the cockerel, and ending with an uncomfortable register of
dark comedy that emerges from the misery and despair of both the protagonist
and the community.
If I were to choose one of the chapters,
falling into the temptation of separating the episodes, I would pick the second
tale. There’s something fascinating in the work of the non-actors, in the
absurd use of a cockerel for a protagonist, in the unexpected developments of
the narrative. The satire is brilliant while containing the melancholy I’ve
mentioned above. And it’s filled with a storm of formal and thematic ideas that
seem to be at the edge of completely overwhelming the viewer. I’m speaking of,
for example, the appearance of a Chinese emperor seems to cast the land itself
into a tragedy of fatalistic destruction, the use of cell phone messages
creates a game of mistranslations between the voice-over and the written text
that extends to the other in other forms, and the mix of almost documentary
images with peculiar details like a bowie worn by the cockerel or even the
accordionist that follows one of the characters.
It’s easy to establish connections with other
auteurs in the history of the art like Pasolini, Kiarostami, Resnais,
Andersson, Buñuel, etc, but, despite having done just that, such an effort
seems futile and uninteresting having in account the way Gomes emerges as the
creator of such an abysmally ambitious cinematic monument. The film is metatextual,
intellectual, weirdly populist, documental and mythological in scope. It’s a
miraculously clear and direct mixture of these aspects, creating a density that
makes this almost a cinematic equivalent of The
Lusiads for a contemporary audience. It’s an epic of the Portuguese people,
but here, instead of the heroes of the age of Discovery, we have the misery of
the social and economic conditions in contemporary Portugal told in the form of
stories and legends, as magnificent in their oneiric visions as silly in their
humour and tragic in their representation of the absurdities of this country.
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