ARABIAN NIGHTS (Miguel Gomes) Subtitled. 381 minutes. See listing. Rating: NNN
Early on in the delirious if exhausting Arabian Nights Trilogy, Portuguese filmmaker Miguel Gomes shows up onscreen. He surveys the hardship and sorrow spilling across his country after the economic crisis and concludes that it’s impossible to capture these stories.
That doesn’t stop him from trying, and playfully calling on One Thousand And One Nights’ raconteuse Queen Scheherazade (a soulful Crista Alfaiate) to narrate. Borrowing that work’s timeless structure, Gomes tries to impose some order on the chaos while questioning the very idea of storytelling.
Scheherazade’s tales cover Portugal’s politicians, working class and even livestock, all pitted against each other in situations that draw on facts while being pitched as fables with an allegorical payoff.
So it goes over three sections (The Restless One, The Desolate One and The Enchanted One, screened separately) that together run for 381 minutes and sprawl across genres, moods and eras. Documentary collides with mysticism bittersweet comedy is found in harsh reality and that reality is often more absurd than the magical stuff.
In The Restless One, a committee’s decisions on an economic stimulus package is based on the size of their erections. In a farcical courtroom scene in The Desolate One, ghost cows and talking trees are called as witnesses to a petty crime that snowballs into a harrowing societal meltdown. In The Enchanted One, Scheherazade herself takes a mischievous stroll through Baghdad, where she meets a genie, Elvis the bandit and a dumb blond “Paddleman” who looks like he was sculpted by Michelangelo.
These are highlights in an anthology where the tales range from enchanting to WTF. Among the latter, I’m thinking of the ass-numbing documentary finale about men who raise chaffinches to compete in singing contests.
The bigger picture, if Gomes has indeed found it, seems impenetrable. It’s pretty frustrating to spend over six hours with a film and still feel like you’re missing something. But even if he shrugs his shoulders about where it all leads, Gomes is among the very few filmmakers compelling enough to follow down that kind of rabbit hole.
After trudging through it, Arabian Nights will stick with you for an even longer time.
