Tabu

As “Tabu” dives into the past, it switches from black-and-white 35mm to black-and-white 16mm; the images gain the attractive haze of faulty memory. Aurora, now played by the regally erotic Ana Moreira, is married to a dullard plantation owner (Ivo Müller) and pregnant with his child, but she tailspins into a torrid romance with the studly young Ventura (Carloto Cotta). It’s a classic l’amour fou, the old dance of sex and death, but the film has an odd attitude toward it. We only hear the older Ventura’s rhapsodic narration, never the characters’ voices, and that narrative track often plays out over images of the Mozambique terrain and the natives’ faces, of daily labors and empty rooms. It’s as though Gomes were remaking Murnau’s docu-fiction so that the two halves obliquely criticize each other.