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 .
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. what is the movie taboo about
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
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. It is about an elderly woman’s regret and
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.
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