What Is The Movie Taboo About ((top)) -
The lovers’ “Paradise” is only possible because of the brutal system that surrounds them. Black African servants and laborers are silent, background figures—picking up laundry, serving drinks, rowing boats. Their oppression is the hidden foundation upon which the white protagonists’ emotional drama is built. The film suggests that the passionate, transgressive love between Aurora and Ventura is itself a product of colonial escape. They are not rebelling against empire; they are fleeing deeper into a private fantasy of it, a “paradise” that was always an illusion.
The film is divided into three parts. The “Prologue” introduces an unnamed explorer climbing a mountain in Africa, who encounters a dying crocodile and a woman in a trance. This surreal, silent sequence establishes themes of fate, nature, and myth. what is the movie taboo about
So, what is Tabu about? It is about a love affair, but also about an empire. It is about an elderly woman’s regret and a gambler’s tall tale. More deeply, it is a meta-cinematic inquiry into why we crave stories of forbidden passion, especially when those stories are built on foundations of silence and injustice. By splitting its narrative and bathing its colonial past in beautiful, archaic light, Miguel Gomes’s Tabu argues that the most dangerous taboo of all is the desire to remember a paradise that never existed for everyone. The film is not an endorsement of its characters’ passions, but a careful, mournful autopsy of them. The lovers’ “Paradise” is only possible because of
The film’s most profound subject is the taboo against nostalgic narrative itself. Part 2 is presented as a silent film (except for Ventura’s voice-over, the music, and diegetic sounds), shot in luscious, widescreen black-and-white. Gomes is critiquing the very form of colonial nostalgia: the way we wash painful history in the sepia tones of memory. Ventura’s story is beautiful, romantic, and utterly self-serving. He omits the violence, the boredom, and the complicity of their lives. The film suggests that the passionate, transgressive love
is set in contemporary Lisbon. It follows Aurora, an elderly, cantankerous widow, and her pious, frustrated neighbor, Pilar. Aurora’s life is one of mundane misery, gambling debts, and fantastical complaints—until her final days, when she begs Pilar to find a man named Ventura, a mysterious figure from her past. This section is grounded, neorealist, and suffused with a quiet melancholy about modern loneliness.
is a flashback, told by the elderly Ventura to Pilar after Aurora’s death. Set in the early 1960s at the foot of an extinct volcano in Portuguese-occupied Africa (presumably Mozambique or Cape Verde), this section follows a young, passionate Aurora and the dashing, melancholic Ventura. They are neighbors and lovers, but Aurora is married to a brutish, wealthy farmer. Their affair unfolds with operatic intensity—midnight rendezvous, jungle escapes, and a final, desperate plan to flee together on a steamship named Tabu .
The taboo, therefore, is the act of looking back at a colonial world and seeing only romance. Pilar, the empathetic modern listener, is the audience surrogate—she wants to believe in the pure, tragic love. But the film constantly undercuts this. The final shot—Ventura rowing away from a distraught Aurora, leaving her to her fate—is not a noble sacrifice but an act of cowardice. The movie’s true, unspoken subject is that our most cherished memories are often the lies we tell ourselves to avoid confronting our own moral failures.
