A Scheherazade in Today’s Portugal
Miguel Gomes’s ‘Arabian Nights’ Looks at a Gloomy Nation
LISBON — On a cool night last month, Miguel Gomes, one of Portugal’s most prominent film directors, was shooting a scene for his latest movie in an outdoor amphitheater, high above the Tagus River here. Pall Mall cigarette in hand, he told an actress to look more beleaguered before she began a crucial monologue that captures the country’s dark mood.
“She can’t stand it anymore; she feels all this weight,” Mr. Gomes said before calling “Acção!” (pronounced as-AUW), Portuguese for “Action!” It was the final day in Lisbon for the shoot of “As 1,001 Noites,” or “Arabian Nights,” an experimental yearlong project in which the director has blended fact and fiction to examine contemporary Portugal in the throes of its debt crisis.
Mr. Gomes’s films, including the critically acclaimed “Tabu” (2012), have often featured documentary-style footage. But for “Arabian Nights,” which is expected to be released next year, he took this approach to a new level, bringing on a team of three journalists to research real reports from the Portuguese press and develop them with screenwriters into around a dozen fictional episodes, all narrated by a contemporary Scheherazade.
“I thought maybe that I should make a film with Portuguese stories that are popping up, appearing at this moment,” Mr. Gomes said. “Arabian Nights” is one of the first films to take on the euro crisis. It attempts to hold a mirror, albeit a convex one, to a country struggling with unemployment, emigration and general gloom.
While television coverage of the crisis has been “superficial,” a film can add “a level of depth that only cinema can bring,” said Vasco Câmara, a film critic and editor at Público, a Lisbon daily, who has been tracking the movie since Mr. Gomes announced it.
For the movie’s structure, Mr. Gomes turned to “The Arabian Nights,” whose heroine tells stories to her new husband, the king, to delay her death sentence. Despite working with factual material, Mr. Gomes, 42, said he had wanted to transcend the real and create a kind of diversion — a complex, more self-aware kind of fiction.
“The idea is not to give back this kind of reality that we are living in my country, but to recreate it as fiction,” he said. “That’s Scheherazade’s job.”
The euro crisis may be less dominant in the headlines today, but the social toll of the tax increases, wage cuts and reductions to social services that came in exchange for a foreign bailout in 2011 is still felt in Portugal. Although unemployment has dropped to 13.9 percent, down from above 17 percent last year, it remains higher than the European average. But the picture is more complex. Hundreds of thousands of Portuguese don’t figure on the unemployment rolls because they have emigrated to seek work abroad. In 2012 about 120,000 people emigrated from Portugal, which has a population of 10 million and a labor force of 5.5 million, according to the country’s statistics agency.
To find reports that might inspire episodes in the film, the journalists — Maria José Oliveira, João de Almeida Dias and Rita Ferreira — scoured local papers and produced daily news roundups for the screenwriters. They also produced reported articles and published them on the movie’s websitewebsite. One is the story of a married couple outside Lisbon who committed suicide in October, a complicated event that captured the country’s pervasive pessimism. Another tells of a songbird competition held by working-class men in Lisbon.
“It’s a different country from 2009 or 2010,” Ms. Oliveira said, sitting in the film’s makeshift newsroom, beneath a map of Portugal with pins on the 40 towns the team had visited. Back in 2012, there were huge public demonstrations in Portugal, but now people have grown tired.
“There’s a silent poverty,” Mr. Dias said. “The middle class almost disappeared.” Ms. Oliveira said the project had no political slant.
The journalists began researching articles last fall. Before filming began in November, Mr. Gomes chose about two dozen actors — men and women, old and young — to build the characters as they progressed, said Luis Urbano, a co-producer of the film. Along the way they were joined by many nonactors and extras.
The monologue for which Mr. Gomes was giving direction is part of a trial scene that was inspired by the real story of a Portuguese judge who began to cry after pronouncing the sentence of a man accused last year of robbing people at knife-point outside A.T.M.s.
“I’m feeling sick,” the judge (the Portuguese actress Luísa Cruz) says in the film. “This grotesque chain of stupidity, evil, desperation is beginning to test my competence and above all my patience.”
As he watched that night’s shooting, Mr. Urbano said, “In general, it’s about the situation, the loss of innocence.” Ever since Portugal signed its loan agreement in 2011, much of the national conversation has revolved around assigning blame for the mess. “That nobody is innocent in the country” is an idea that gained traction, Mr. Urbano added. “The people blame bankers; the bankers blame politicians.”
In September Mr. Gomes will shoot a final scene near Marseille, whose regional government has contributed funding for “Arabian Nights.” The movie also has some financing from the state-run Portuguese film institute, but more than half of its budget, three million euros (about $4 million), comes from abroad, Mr. Urbano said, including government money from France and Switzerland.
Portugal has been a constant source of inspiration for Mr. Gomes, who studied film in Lisbon and began his career as a critic before moving behind the camera. His first feature, “The Face You Deserve,” appeared in 2004. In 2008 “Our Beloved Month of August,” which revealed his melancholic style and his love-hate relationship with his native country, put him on the international map.
Obsessed with the unreliability of memory, individual and collective, Mr. Gomes in “Tabu” used flashbacks to tell the story of an elderly woman in Lisbon. Filmed in black and white, “Tabu” used voice-overs and a quasi-documentary style, akin to that of an old newsreel. That year, at the Berlin Film Festival, it won the Critics’ Prize and the Alfred Bauer Prize for opening “new perspectives on cinematic art.” His 26-minute film “Redemption,” shown at last year’s Venice Film Festival, is shot like a home movie from the pasts of four European leaders, including Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany.
Rui Vieira Nery, the director of Portuguese language and culture programs at the Gulbenkian Institute in Lisbon, the country’s pre-eminent cultural institution, described Mr. Gomes’s work as “very ambivalent.” He said the director was inspired by, but also departed from, Portugal’s Cinema Novo of the 1960s and 1970s, which had drawn on Italian neorealism and the French New Wave and had become more political after the Carnation Revolution of 1974 toppled Portugal’s dictatorship.
“There’s a certain disenchantment with the great narratives of the traditional left — the need for utopian goals and moral values, of something to believe in,” Mr. Nery said of Mr. Gomes’s films. “On the other hand, there’s a certain feeling of defeat” and a “disenchantment that’s combined with this urge for a project we can believe in.”
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