What Is The Movie Taboo About May 2026
The film’s most profound subject is the taboo against nostalgic narrative itself. Part 2 is presented as a silent film (except for Ventura’s voice-over, the music, and diegetic sounds), shot in luscious, widescreen black-and-white. Gomes is critiquing the very form of colonial nostalgia: the way we wash painful history in the sepia tones of memory. Ventura’s story is beautiful, romantic, and utterly self-serving. He omits the violence, the boredom, and the complicity of their lives.
The lovers’ “Paradise” is only possible because of the brutal system that surrounds them. Black African servants and laborers are silent, background figures—picking up laundry, serving drinks, rowing boats. Their oppression is the hidden foundation upon which the white protagonists’ emotional drama is built. The film suggests that the passionate, transgressive love between Aurora and Ventura is itself a product of colonial escape. They are not rebelling against empire; they are fleeing deeper into a private fantasy of it, a “paradise” that was always an illusion.
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. what is the movie taboo about
Miguel Gomes’s 2012 film Tabu is a work of deliberate paradox. Its title promises scandalous content, yet the film is a slow, elegant, black-and-white meditation split into two distinct chapters. To answer “what is the movie Tabu about?” requires moving beyond a simple plot summary. On its surface, the film is about a nostalgic, impossible love affair in a dying Portuguese colonial outpost. At its core, however, Tabu is about the nature of storytelling itself, the inescapable guilt of colonialism, and the way memory romanticizes—and thereby perpetuates—personal and historical violence.
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. The film’s most profound subject is the taboo
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.
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 . Black African servants and laborers are silent, background
The central “taboo” of the film’s title is initially literal: adultery. In the conservative, dying colonial society of “Paradise,” a married woman’s open affair with her neighbor is an unspeakable scandal. Yet Gomes quickly complicates this. The real taboo is not the act of infidelity, but the act of abandoning one’s life for pure, selfish romantic passion—especially when that passion is inseparable from colonial privilege.
