The second part of Portuguese auteur Miguel Gomes' three-film saga looks at the causes and consequences of a nation in crisis.
The art house equivalent of Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, the second part in Portuguese maverick Miguel Gomes’ Arabian Nights trilogy, The Desolate One, is an appropriately striking, dramatic and even mirthful work that, however, would make little sense on its own. A Lusophone Scheherazade here narrates three more tales, with the last subdivided into another three parts, and Gomes tries to get to the heart of the messy matter that is the state of his country. Though screened as three separate films on three different days in Cannes — which cannot help but recall the way in which the literary Scheherazade leaves her audience hanging at the end of each night — this is really one long six-hour-plus opus that’ll no-doubt be part of numerous marathon screenings at festivals and cinema-loving institutions such as cinematheques.
Part one suggested contemporary Portugal was a restless nation, and part two further explores the notion that the severe austerity measures “executed by a government devoid of social justice,” as per onscreen text, have thrown the country into disarray and despair, though some hope always remains.
The first of the three stories recounted here is the oddly titled, 37-minute yarn "The Chronicle of the Escape of Simao 'Without Bowels.'" Chico Chapas plays the titular lead here, and his somewhat haggard appearance but limber movements and scrawny frame are perfect for this story of an old man, Simao, who never gets fat even though he eats a lot — hence the suggestion he doesn’t have any bowels — and who roams the countryside without a fixed abode, trying to elude the police, who are looking for him for several murders. For six weeks, 160 policemen were looking for him, Scheherazade tells us, but Gomes is not interested in the police-hunt aspect of the story. Instead, he stays close to Simao, which suggests how hard it is to survive off the grid in contemporary Europe but also, in an ironic turn of events, shows how someone with several murders to his name nonetheless became a local hero simply because he managed to defy the much-hated authorities for so long. Clearly, the enemy’s enemy is a friend even in crisis-hit Portugal.
The main event in part two, and the most overtly political segment of the entirely trilogy, is the second tale, "The Tears of the Judge." In a theatrically decked-out outdoor amphitheater, a stern female judge (Fernanda Loureiro), clad in Bordeaux-colored velvet robes, hears a case that starts out quite simply but quickly grows so convoluted that everyone in the audience turns out to be implicated. The absurdity of the plotting here, as the arbitrator tries to uncover the causes of a single criminal act but instead wades deeper and deeper into a morass of interconnected causes, suggests how criminal behavior can’t be understood on a simple case-by-case basis in which one cause leads to one effect. Instead, the whole system that surrounds the desperate acts of desperate people needs to be taken into consideration and improved so these acts won’t happen in the future. Full of theatrical speeches and flashes of mordant humor, such as when Gomes brings on a “lie detector” in the shape of a machete-wielding man, the outcome of this 40-minute segment is finally utterly depressing.
imdb:tt4692234
