While the giants of the streaming world duke it out over Ashton Kutcher sitcoms and Top Gear rehashes, Mubi is singlehandedly realising the potential that subscription services have to push viewers beyond their comfort zones. Alongside its usual roster of arthouse favourites and Hollywood oddities, the platform has had exclusive online premieres for a Paul Thomas Anderson documentary, a key work of the contemporary Canadian avant garde (88.88), and now Arabian Nights, the acclaimed three-volume opus from Portugal’s Miguel Gomes.
This 382-minute epic opens with Gomes in a creative slump, bemoaning in a theatrical cameo his inability to do cinematic justice to Portugal’s fraught sociopolitical landscape. Threatened with execution by a mutinying crew, a desperate Gomes calls upon Scheherazade – the legendary storyteller of the Middle Eastern tome from which Arabian Nights takes its title – to give voice to his ruminations on Portugal’s woes.
Over the course of the next six hours, Gomes has Scheherazade recount a bevy of stories – some bluntly realist, some elaborately far-fetched – addressing the impact of the Portuguese government’s devastating austerity regime. The film’s tone varies wildly across its mammoth runtime, though the titles affixed to each of Arabian Nights’ three volumes (The Restless One, The Desolate One and The Enchanted One) give some indication of their overall character, even if the final volume might equally be called The One With The Unbearably Long Bit About Chaffinch Trappers.
As evidenced by a sequence in which representatives of the European troika are cured of erectile dysfunction by a nomadic wizard, the satire of Arabian Nights is often broad and unapologetically juvenile, of the kind you might see delivered by Keith Chegwin in a touring Christmas panto. Still, if plotlines sometimes feel as if they’d make more sense on stage at the Milton Keynes Theatre, Gomes orchestrates each narrative with a verve and confidence that places this film firmly in the realm of high art – albeit high art with a penchant for dick jokes.
Overall, though, Arabian Nights has the unashamedly messy feel of an artist’s sketchbook, filled with abandoned ideas, erratic stylistic choices and lengthy streams of consciousness. Personally, I couldn’t help but admire Gomes for standing against the fussy perfectionism of so much European art cinema, even as I resented him for inflicting this wilfully unsatisfying saga upon the world.
