And so Miguel Gomes’s poetic trilogy continues: elegant, mystifying and demure, inspired by Portugal’s miseries under austerity and by The Arabian Nights. This middle section is the “desolate” one, as opposed to the “restless” first episode or the “enchanted” third part, yet to come. The desolation manifests itself in the final five minutes, although it perfumes the entire film. As before, Scheherazade (Crista Alfaiate) narrates and we hear three more tales, supposedly selected from the 470th, 484th and 497th nights of her ordeal (there is a gigantic epic somewhere out there, of which this huge trilogy is just a sample). There are erotic images of naked women, a visual rhyme for the young virgins of Baghdad in the first film.
The tales are The Chronicle of the Escape of Simão “Without Bowels”; The Tears of the Judge and The Owners of Dixie. In the first, Simão is a notorious mass killer (his “without bowels” nickname is down to his thinness) who is being hunted by police with a drone camera. The narrator notes that “evil is only a severe tendency of selfishness”, and shows that public disaffection with everything turns Simão into a folk hero.
In the second, a judge is reduced to tears at a surreal, outdoor legal proceeding, like A Midsummer Night’s Dream of judicial madness. Every crime has its origin in another crime – including a rich landlord making prank emergency calls to undermine Portugal’s public health service – and the wrongdoings are impossible to disentangle.
In the third, a stray dog called Dixie is adopted by a melancholy elderly couple and given to an impoverished younger pair reliant on food banks. The effect of these movies – part realist, part dream-like – is gradual and yet very potent.
