British audiences now have a chance to sample the exotic and mysterious miscellany in the first of three feature-length movie episodes from Portuguese auteur Miguel Gomes: a docu-fantasy hybrid, epically and experimentally proportioned and very loosely inspired by The Arabian Nights. Volume 1, entitled The Restless One, is an opaque compendium of stories – like the ones Scheherazade told to stave off her own death – all responding in indirect ways to the miseries forced on Portugal by austerity, as if by a social-realist Buñuel with a bit of the novelist José Saramago’s existential musing; the same kind of absurdism and deadly serious political scepticism.
Gomes’s previous movies, Our Beloved Month of August (2008) and Tabu (2012), were eccentric hothouse flowers of cinema, and rather joyful in intent. The Arabian Nights looks darker and sadder and angrier. Gomes’s reaction to the austerity crisis is a revival of something like the ’68 New Wave – resistance through poetry, sous les pavés la plage. Fragments of documentary realism and postmodern gestures towards the director’s own personal anxiety about cinema are shovelled together with fables and stories. It’s mystifying, but like irregular shards of different glass in a mosaic, they progressively make more sense as the film makes headway.
The director begins by showing himself brooding over the catastrophic closure of Portugal’s Viana Do Castelo shipyards, and about how a plague of wasps is killing bees – the way that punitive politics are killing the people’s spirit, perhaps? Gomes agonises over meaning and metaphor. He proposes a series of stories and fables in response, but instantly suspects a decadent escapist folly in the whole enterprise: it could be “dandyism”. An official remarks: “The meagre resources of Portuguese cinema are incompatible with your reveries.”
Arabian Nights is actually a European co-production, with money supplied by the French television company ARTE and Germany’s Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen, who are rewarded with a surreally brief, disconnected scene in a German schoolroom in which a kid gets his finger stuck in his desk – perhaps mocking the EU’s German paymasters.
Gomes forges ahead, and we are treated to three separate tales in this first movie. In The Men With Hard-Ons, impotent bankers, embittered by their erectile dysfunction, take out their rage on Portuguese debtors. In the second, The Cockerel and the Fire, a cockerel is put on trial for crowing too early, in the middle of the night, warning of arson carried out by disaffected teens. The case becomes famous and political discontent is such that voters start spoiling their ballots by voting for the noisy rooster. In the third, The Swim of the Magnificents, an ailing swimming teacher tries to organise a therapeutic outdoor swimming festival on New Year’s Day, in which the participants will be those who have been damaged by austerity – and from whom we hear gruellingly real testimony.
Are these stories really anything like the Arabian Nights? Maybe, in that Scheherazade’s stories did not primarily exist to explain or transform reality but delay it: to push back the awful reality of a death sentence. And that could be a political project: to defer debt repayment, because in the long run we are all dead. Gomes’s Arabian Nights exerts its own strange allure.
