An impressively dense yet fleeting concatenation of doomed love and colonial guilt, as well as a reflection on the changing aesthetics and characteristics of cinema, Tabu is a deeply emotional and heartbreaking film; like its female protagonist, Aurora, it’s bipolar, both depressive and ecstatic. Though it looks and feels like a different beast than Miguel Gomes’ first two features, Tabu shares with them a preoccupation with storytelling and the perceptual contrast between “reality” and “fiction.”

Like Our Beloved Month of August (VIFF 08), Tabu is divided into two parts—“Paradise Lost” (in high-contrast black-and-white 35mm) and “Paradise” (in the gauzier, fuzzier 16mm of reminiscence). In “Paradise Lost,” the benevolent, religious Pilar, the elderly, guilt-ridden Aurora, and the suffering, saintly servant Santa walk through the gloomy present as if lighting cigarettes with the weight of history on their shoulders. The 1960s set “Paradise,” propelled by a dense and literate voiceover, speeds by in Aurora and Ventura’s past, months leaping forward from cut to cut as Aurora’s belly grows and the two lovers approach, come together, fall apart and reunite for one momentous night. It’s no coincidence that Gomes name-checks Murnau; their Tabus share a title, an aspect ratio, a format, a colonial setting, maybe a shot of a flower and a pair of doomed lovers. Yet in Gomes’ astonishing masterpiece there is no innocence to begin with, no fall from grace, but rather a tale of history’s “winners” told by Gianluca Ventura, a romantic loser.