A brief prologue, separate from the rest of the plot, playfully introduces the main themes of Miguel Gomes’s intoxicating Tabu. A fearless explorer treks through the African wilderness, but also proves to be on the run from his past. The combination of doomed love and Europe’s colonial past also characterises the rest of Gomes’s rich, allegorical film that playfully runs away with film history. Whereas F.W. Murnau subdivided his South Seas classic Tabu into the diptych ‘Paradise’ and ‘Paradise Lost’, Gomes chooses the reverse order. His story starts in contemporary Portugal where paradise seems further away than ever for three lonely ladies: Pilar who is in her 50s, her flamboyant, fragile older neighbour Aurora and the latter’s Cape Verdean housekeeper Santa. The second part of the film returns to paradise when Gian Luca Ventura reminisces (in silent film style) about his doomed love affair with Aurora in Mozambique in the 1960s which, at the time, was a Portuguese colony. This proves what was foreshadowed by the prologue: no matter how far you run, you can’t escape your own heart.
