“If you look closely at what’s really happening in the world we’re living
in, it’s a delirious reality,” filmmaker Miguel Gomes says. In his native country of Portugal, as in many other countries, austerity as a result of the European debt crisis doesn’t mean just a fragile economy but a fragile personal existence. “Everything seems to be shifting,” he
says, “and we’re starting to understand that the European Union was only about money. Because the money’s not flowing like it was in the past, the shit hits the fan.”Gomes’s artistic response to his nation’s woes is “Arabian Nights,” which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival. Clocking in at just under six and a half hours, and split into three volumes — “The Restless One,” “The Desolate One,” and “The Enchanted One” — it offers a kaleidoscopic portrait of Portugal through a conflation of myth and realism, where real-life stories and invented narratives collide. (The first volume opens
in theaters December 4, with the next two rolling out later in the month.)Each volume begins with a disclaimer, reminding the viewer that the film is not an adaptation of the book “The Arabian Nights.” “I always loved the structure of the book and was fascinated by the vertigo it gives, the multiplicity of the stories to a point where you almost go insane,” Gomes says. The film does borrow the character of Scheherazade, who must continue to tell her stories to the king in a bid to prolong not just her life but also those of the rest of Baghdad’s citizenry. In Gomes’s hands, the stories she tells are of a more absurd, and sometimes scatological, variety: politicians cursed with never-ending erections; an elderly criminal capable of teleportation who becomes a local hero
for evading the law; a birdsong competition; a rooster who runs for office; and
an exploding whale, among others. But
all these narrative diversions serve the same purpose. For Gomes, who appears in the beginning of the first volume comically debating the pressures of creating fiction in the midst of crisis, the only way to restore a crumbling society is to tell its stories.The director claims he originally planned to make a film in Mexico, but with the tumultuous socioeconomic situation in Portugal, he felt drawn to making
it at home. He hired a team of journalists, who, over the course of a year, collected stories from around the country to be used in the film. The production team filmed certain scenes at the same time that the journalists were out in the field culling research for the next ones. “It was like a factory for producing fiction and film, where every step of the process was completely mixed,” he says. “In one week we’re editing something we already shot, we’re talking with the journalists about the possibility of a new story, or writing a new script, or rehearsing with the actors.”How it would all coalesce was at times unclear. “The first six months were quite tough, because we didn’t know how the film would end,” Gomes says with a laugh. “Normally when we do a film, it’s eight weeks of shooting; here it was one year, and after six months we’re saying, ‘What the hell are we doing?’” The crew was placing bets on how long the film would be, with some estimating up to 20 hours. It wasn’t until the editing process that Gomes stumbled upon the solution of separating the stories into three distinct, but connected, films. “I understood at
that moment we could organize the episodes we shot in a way that each volume could be a different experience of cinema,” he says. “Each would have its own mood.”The effect is that of a collective conscious bursting at the seams. In a chapter titled “The Tears of the Judge,” which appears in the second volume, a trial spins out
of control, with a series of surrealistic confessions and denials — beginning with a case of stolen furniture and going on to include the grievances of mail-order Chinese brides, a genie, a man with a machete who acts as a “lie detector,” and the spirit of a cow — that ultimately condemns everyone present. In “The Owners of Dixie,” which appears in the second volume, the titular dog — Gomes calls it a “Walt Disney dog” — ambles into the lives of various inhabitants of a poor housing estate. The film makes room, among the human-canine interactions, for a full taxonomy of the building and its problems, including an elevator that has stopped working because people are urinating down the shaft. Gomes summarizes this combination of comedy and tragedy as a battery thesis. “You have to have a positive and a negative pulse,” he says with a smirk. “You have to have the opposites at the same time to assure that there is electricity. For me, electricity is cinema.”There are many ways a political film about what is happening right now in Portugal could have been made. But for Gomes, “Arabian Nights” was the fairest way to tell the stories of this time and place. “It was important to show what was happening with the people, but it was also important to start to create a collective imagination that comes from this present moment,” he explains. “Like Scheherazade said, stories come from the desire and fear of the people. If we’re afraid something might happen, we think about it, we build a fantasy about it. So it’s important to have the reality of the fantasy, the reality of desires and fears, and also the reality of the material world.”
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