Arabian Nights

Arabian Nights is being shown/sold as three separate films coalescing into a unitary whole. Per Gomes , “It’s one and it’s three. You know about the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit? This is one film and three films at the same time.” The three installments share the same premise and feature both professional and amateur performers in multiple roles; it’s arguable whether the trinity in fact builds to a sum equal or greater than their parts. As with Nymphomaniac ‘s two-part theatrical release, I suspect Arabian Nights ‘ division has much to do with the practical advantages of having people paying for admission on multiple occasions. The Wes Anderson-aping opening credits — yellow Futura titles against a bright-red backdrop — already tell us quite a bit. Gomes is on the record about his admiration for Anderson, whose direct influence will again become apparent in volume three; for now, we can think about what this means besides an affectionate hat-tip. Anderson’s films have created a sort of shared universe, united not by carryover characters but by immediately recognizable, hyper-stylized traits and tropes, both visual and thematic. This, then, is an indication that four features into his career, there is a recognizable Gomes Universe that will be revisited, maximalized and literally indexed. Arabian Nights’ end credits come with a complete index to the film, each chapter title listed with the corresponding starting minute within the entirety of all three volumes — a fussy, dare I say Andersonian, touch. This introductory segment starts with observational footage of out-of-work/striking shipyard workers, then segues into a 8 1/2 -ish self-reflexive passage about the anxiety of the director. In voiceover, Gomes outlines the project — to gather news stories from poor, austerity-starved Portugal, then transmute them into fantasy — and mock-berates himself for taking it on. “Any muttonhead,” he says, could tell that it’s “impossible to make a militant film that wants to forget it’s militant.” This is a little cloying in the way that all sorry-not-sorry declarations are, basically accurate, and highlights another regular project of the Gomes Universe: to reconcile the irreconcilable. His basically unwatchable first feature The Face You Deserve is one narrative for the first 15 minutes, then abruptly morphs into an entirely different story for the rest of its interminable bulk. Our Beloved Month of August ostensibly begins as rural portraiture documentary, but increasingly erupts into, and is finally overtaken by, unambiguously fictional passages. Tabu is the most evenly diptych-ish of the lot: its first half is more-or-less austere arthouse drama about present-day Lisbon, its second a “silent” (lots of music, intertitles, no audible dialogue) fantasia of romance in colonial Africa, juxtaposing the ultra-formalist festival film present with some of its most potent sources of classical inspiration. Arabian Nights is another example of trying to square the circle, and in its first 23 minutes it’s immediately torn and frayed between Gomes’ mock moment of panic (he runs away from the crew) and two incomplete documentaries. One is about the shipyard workers, the other about a man obsessed with eradicating wasps from the countryside by killing them with fire. As in Our Beloved Month of August , this gives Gomes an excuse to set rural areas aflame, a preoccupation which will occur again later. Conclusion: Miguel Gomes is the reigning pyromaniac of Portuguese arthouse cinema. Nice little digression here, with a lot of beautiful women sitting in “Bagdad” (actually Marseilles), eating grapes, drinking wine and so on in long lateral pans. The ostensible story here is that they’re being kept safely from the clutches of the homicidal Sultan who’s killed all his wives up to Scheherazade. The voiceover gets that across, but the segment functions equally well as an unmotivated idyll. A very long one-note joke. Short version: those imposing