Movie Review SSJ

Miguel Gomes’ 2012 film Tabu is a haunting meditation on love, memory, and the inescapability of desire, framed through a narrative structure that blurs the boundaries between reality, myth, and cinematic artifice. Divided into three thematically interwoven chapters—”Paradise Lost,” “Paradise,” and an enigmatic prologue—the film interrogates the concept of taboo not merely as a societal prohibition but as a metaphysical condition of human longing. Through its fragmented storytelling, lush visual symbolism, and philosophical undertones, Tabu compels viewers to confront the paradox of love as both a liberating force and a prison of the soul. This essay examines how the film deconstructs the moral binaries surrounding forbidden romance while critiquing the institutionalization of love through marriage, ultimately posing a provocative question: Is taboo an external imposition or an internal reckoning with the self?

I. Narrative Structure: Escaping the Inescapable

The film’s opening act, set in contemporary Lisbon, introduces Aurora (Laura Soveral), an elderly woman haunted by spectral visions of her past. Her relationship with her African maid, Santa (Isabel Cardoso), and her devout neighbor, Pilar (Teresa Madruga), is strained by Aurora’s erratic behavior and her cryptic references to a “crocodile-infested pond.” This seemingly mundane setup gives way to a radical tonal shift when Ventura (Carloto Cotta), a man from Aurora’s past, arrives to recount their shared history in the film’s second chapter, titled “Paradise.”

Here, Gomes transports viewers to a colonial-era African farmstead, shot in grainy black-and-white 16mm with no audible dialogue—only voiceover narration and ambient sound. This stylistic choice evokes the silent-film era, framing Ventura and Aurora’s affair as both timeless and mythic. Their love blossoms against the backdrop of an unnamed African colony, where Aurora, already married and pregnant, begins a clandestine relationship with Ventura, a charismatic musician. The idyllic “paradise” of their affair—symbolized by the lush landscapes and the recurring motif of a crocodile—is ruptured when Aurora accidentally kills Ventura’s best friend during a hunting trip, triggering a chain of violence and exile.

The crocodile, a silent witness to their initial flirtations, evolves into a potent metaphor for desire itself: a primordial force that lurks beneath the surface of societal norms, capable of dragging the lovers into a “pond of yearning” from which there is no escape. Ventura’s final act—a suicidal plunge into the crocodile-infested waters—epitomizes the film’s central thesis: the impossibility of fleeing one’s own heart. Geography, time, and even death prove insufficient to sever the psychic bonds forged by taboo love.

II. “Paradise Lost”: The Spiritual Wasteland of Modernity

The film’s title, Tabu, explicitly references F.W. Murnau’s 1931 South Seas romance Tabu: A Story of the South Seas, but Gomes layers this homage with allusions to John Milton’s Paradise Lost. The intertitle “Paradise Lost” appears after the African chapter concludes, signaling a transition from mythic memory to the barren reality of postcolonial Lisbon. Aurora, Pilar, Santa, and Ventura now inhabit a spiritual wasteland—a world stripped of connection to land, ritual, and eros.

This “loss of paradise” is not merely a geographic displacement (Aurora’s exile from Africa) but a metaphysical severance from the animating forces of life. Gomes frames modernity as a realm where love has been reduced to contractual obligation, and desire is pathologized as a disruptive anomaly. Aurora’s death early in the film symbolizes the extinguishing of passion in a society governed by sterile rationality. Pilar, the “good neighbor,” embodies this alienation: her life revolves around charitable acts and religious rituals, yet she remains emotionally adrift, a spectator to her own existence.

The film’s critique extends to the colonial subtext of its African chapter. The farmstead, ostensibly a “paradise,” is revealed as a site of exploitation—both of the land and of human relationships. Aurora’s husband, a wealthy plantation owner, represents the patriarchal order that reduces marriage to a transaction. His violent retaliation against Ventura (a mixed-race man) underscores the intersection of erotic and colonial taboos. In this light, the lovers’ transgression is not merely adultery but a rebellion against hierarchies of race, class, and ownership.

III. Forbidden Love: Contract vs. Covenant

At its core, Tabu is a subversive interrogation of marriage as a social institution. The film aligns with philosopher Immanuel Kant’s infamous definition of marriage as “a contract between two persons of opposite sexes for the lifelong possession of each other’s sexual attributes.” By reducing matrimony to a legal agreement, Kant exposes its fundamental incompatibility with love—a force that resists codification. Gomes amplifies this tension through Aurora and Ventura’s relationship, which flourishes precisely because it exists outside contractual bounds. Their love is a covenant, not a contract: it demands no guarantees, thrives on risk, and acknowledges its own mortality.

Yet society cannot tolerate such autonomy. The moral condemnation of their affair—embodied by Aurora’s husband and the looming “gallows” of societal judgment—reveals the violence inherent in enforcing marital contracts. Gomes does not romanticize infidelity; rather, he portrays it as a tragic necessity for souls imprisoned by convention. When Aurora and Ventura vow to never meet again, their separation is not a moral victory but a surrender to the machinery of social control.

The film’s most radical assertion is that taboo is not inherent to the act of love but is manufactured by systems that conflate possession with intimacy. In one haunting scene, Aurora caresses a crocodile—an act that mirrors her affair with Ventura. Both the animal and the lover represent wild, untamable forces that defy domestication. To love freely, Gomes suggests, is to court danger; to institutionalize love is to suffocate it.

IV. Cinematic Form: Memory as Resistance

Gomes’ formal experimentation serves as an aesthetic counterpart to the film’s thematic rebellion. The African chapter’s silent-film aesthetic—complete with intertitles and exaggerated performances—evokes the flickering fragility of memory. By denying characters audible voices, Gomes emphasizes the inadequacy of language to capture desire. Sound becomes a spectral presence: the rustle of wind, the hum of a record player, the ominous growl of a crocodile. These textures evoke a world where emotions are felt, not articulated.

The film’s bifurcated structure—split between past and present, sound and silence, Africa and Europe—mirrors the fragmentation of the self under societal constraints. Ventura’s confession to Pilar in the film’s closing moments bridges these dichotomies, suggesting that storytelling itself is an act of resistance against erasure. By recounting their forbidden history, Ventura resurrects Aurora not as a sinner but as a tragic heroine—a Eurydice forever slipping back into the underworld of collective amnesia.

V. Conclusion: The Crocodile’s Gaze

Tabu concludes with a lingering shot of the crocodile, its eyes glinting in the moonlight. This creature—simultaneously predator and mythic guardian—embodies the film’s unresolved tensions. Is it a judge of human folly, a witness to lost paradises, or a mirror reflecting our own submerged desires?

Gomes offers no easy answers. Instead, he invites viewers to confront the uncomfortable truth that taboos are not external forces but internalized boundaries—vestiges of fear masquerading as morality. In a world increasingly governed by contracts, Tabu is a requiem for the covenant of wild, untamed love. It reminds us that to love without permission is to touch the divine, even as it ensures our fall from grace.

As the old Conde in the film bitterly declares, “I’d rather have a prostitute than get married!”—a line that distills the film’s tragicomic essence. For in the end, Tabu is not a condemnation of love’s transgressions but a lament for the societies that render them necessary. The crocodile’s pond awaits us all; the choice to dive or retreat remains ours alone.