Tabu (2012)

TABU  (2012)  ¢ ¢
    D: Miguel Gomes
    Teresa Madruga, Laura Soveral, Ana Moreira,
    Carloto Cotta, Isabel Cardoso, Ivo Miller
This movie plays like a parody of a European art film. In fact, it is a European art film. It's in Portuguese. It's in black and white. It's in three parts. In the first part, a white man trekking through Africa sees the ghost of a woman who's been dead for 10 years, and then commits suicide by feeding himself to a crocodile. In the second part, an old woman with dementia approaches death, watched over by a neighbor and a live-in caregiver. In the third, an old man recalls a romantic adventure he once had with the same old woman who died in part two. The language is stiff. The rationalizing is ponderous. Some of the stylistic choices are strange, like in part three, where the story is narrated, and you can see the characters talking to each other, but you never hear anything they're saying. Maybe there's a point to that. Like this is a story filtered through an old man's memory, and some things, like what exactly people said to each other, and what their voices sounded like back then, are gone. Or maybe it's art. Or a parody of art. Heck, I don't know.