Arabian Nights: Volume 1, The Restless One

Arabian Nights: Volume 1, The Restless One

If they asked me about America, I’d play Interpol’s “Turn on the Bright Lights” and say it made everything just a little straighter for me after 9/11, and that it scored my first relationship. I’d tell them that my great grandmother ran away from her wedding to join the circus. I’d talk about how Andrew Sarris was my hero, then Molly Haskell, how beautiful it always seemed to me that two kindred spirits could find each other across such apparent differences.

I’d tell them studio filmmaking was perfected here, and sometimes I worry its rewards keep people placated while the rich get richer and gun violence runs rampant. Emmett Till, Elaine May, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Stanley Kauffmann, Michael Brown, Warren Zevon; Charles Burnett and Eugene McCarthy; the good and the bad. That’s America to me.

Everyone has their own version of the country they live in, and they only know so much but in that lack of knowledge lies a multitude of histories. Miguel Gomes’ new film or maybe series of films is more accurate Arabian Nights is about this impulse. It begs pronouncement first: one must watch Arabian Nights all at once. Its parts are delightful on their own terms but sing a more coherent song when seen back to back for six hours straight.

They end strong after six hours. But not if you don’t want to! See them whenever! They’re breezy stylish good times with life lessons attached but Gomes felt compelled to make as much of this movie as he did for a reason. There is a lot of Portugal being forgotten right now under the current government’s reign, and he wanted to remember it all.

“Volume 1: The Restless One,” as he subtitles it is most obviously about trickle-down economics as practiced by the Portuguese government (and every government). We open on a shipyard, during a labor strike. Gomes watches the sad, wet place go unused as we hear stories of men who used to animate the big cranes on the soundtrack. The giant machines sleep while each worker tells what it meant to have a job, to keep everything running.

Then slowly they turn dark. We see broken bones and chipped teeth from strike breakers. We see a lonely news crew covering what one gathers is days after violence has subsided. That’s why Gomes is here, physically, spiritually, morally he wants to make sure that there are more than one news crews here this time around. This story needs more than one news crew but Arabian Nights is six hours long for more reasons than that. That strike is one piece of a puzzle which will depict misery, violence, avarice and confusion, yes but also hope, freedom and solidarity.

Next, Gomes and his crew arrives after filming some of the scenes for the film we are seeing. The camera a small digital one that gets passed around finds Gomes sitting alone on a bench surrounded by his crew. He looks sick, gives an apologetic smile to someone behind the camera and sheepishly leaves the bench; they all pretend not to notice. Afterward, he says in voiceover, “Impotence. Terror at not knowing how to continue with the film.”

“I’m stupid and abstraction gives me vertigo,” he says later when talking about why he can’t link the strike at the shipyard with something else that interests him: a plague of hornets decimating the local bee population. Then he tells both stories at once and it works as if by magic. Not so abstract anymore.

“Remember this confidence,” Gomes begs us (in my imagination), as from here he will weave together many fables within fables within modernized myths within parables within tangents within vignettes into his complex tapestry called Portugal but if you remember how neatly bees were related to striking laborers, you’ll never forget that all this dizzying abstraction also wants to be a strong whole.

Gomes informs us that these stories are being told by Scheherazade yes, THE Scheherazade, who saved herself from execution by telling her murderous husband fairy tales for 1,001 nights straight. In fact every night she takes a speed boat over to an island populated entirely by women who tell her new stories which she then brings back with her to tell her husband, who happens to be a grand vizier bent on killing her for distracting him from killing himself out of sadness over his dead son (or is it because there were no more worlds left?). She’s played by Crista Alfaiate who smiles beautifully when her director talks about how beautiful she is and is introduced by the sweet sounds of “Perfidia” and is above all Portugal. Scheherazade is Portugal.

Three stories are told in “The Restless One.” One is about a group of bankers who wish for permanent erections and get them, but then realize they don’t want them after all. Another is about a rooster who won’t stop yodeling at inappropriate moments; it turns out he has his own story to tell about a preadolescent love triangle.

The last one follows a trade unionist whose stomach turns against him as he tries to collect the tales of three recently unemployed men. It’s basically like an episode of “Parks and Recreation” written by Franz Kafka and directed by Aki Kaurismäki (if such an episode were called “KAFKAkaurismaeki”). Each unfurls its metaphorical underpinning slowly enough for you to have grasped the meaning in modern Portuguese politics just as the next begins.

Arabian Nights part one is a very strange two-hour movie that’s why it’s best seen with parts two and three even though its only sin is not following any rules but its own. And yet every bit of this smorgasbord of colorful characters and gently surreal symbols bears Gomes’ mark; the teller of tales cannot hide himself. His telling of Portugal’s identity crisis is unified by his sense of humor, cinephilia, and awareness that there are always more beautiful things right around the corner.

He believes there is still greatness in the land, in the people sometimes justice too, even if the country is rotten to its core and riddled with police brutality and political corruption. By making modern crusaders a part of a cycle with myths, their struggle becomes heroic again something worth telling over and over like those ancient legends he loves so much.

Nebbish union organizers become swashbuckling heroes although they are eaten alive by doubts and pains inside them; they fight for the nation’s health as best they can. A dozen different sad episodes about tomorrow are being recorded by Gomes who directs; nothing could keep him from helping towards some better day. But Portugal as shown by Gomes wants to be seen as captive: no way could it ever be kept down when it has all these stories itching to burst out!

Watch Arabian Nights: Volume 1, The Restless One For Free On Gomovies.