Portuguese film director Miguel Gomes is one of the premiere filmmakers of the playfully absurd and the surreal, employing a strange mix of those tones. He dazzled audiences in 2012 with “Tabu,” his surrealist meditation that broke through to international audiences, and then in 2015, he made his opus with the three-part “Arabian Nights” that was six hours in total. All of his films mix vibrant, mad scientist tendencies—dashes of mischievous, low-key hilarity and profound, solemn poignancy with fever dream hypnotism.
His latest film, “The Tsugua Diaries” co-directed with French filmmaker Maureen Fazendeiro (“Black Sun”), seems like a bit of a gear shift, a meta film about the difficulties of making a film during a pandemic, launched and birthed during the Covid-19 outbreak. Yet, when you take a look at the new trailer and poster—which we are pleased to present today exclusively—and read the reviews, you see an absurdist and deconstructionist look at filmmaking that has all the trademarks of Gomes’ impish movies.
An official selection at Cannes, New York Film Festival, Toronto, BFI London, Karlovy Vary, and FID Marseille, among others, our review of the film from NYFF cheekily described the movie as an “arthouse ‘Tenet,’” a reference to the way its told—in reverse chronological order—and the way it inventively folds in on itself.
Here’s the synopsis of the film described as “a stripped-down meditation on the lockdown blues.”
A daily journal that reveals only the leadup but rarely the aftermath, the film begins by surveying the mundane routine tasks of three housemates and close friends (Carloto Cotta, Crista Alfaiate, and João Nunes Monteiro) living in rural tranquility during Portugal’s COVID 19 lockdown: impromptu dance parties, gardening, picking fruit, building a backyard butterfly house. Soon, we discover that there’s more going on beyond the limits of the camera frame as various members of a film crew make themselves visible on-screen.
Following Gomes’ ambitious previous works Tabu (2012) and his Arabian Nights (2015) triptych, The Tsugua Diaries presents a stripped-down meditation on the lockdown blues that continues Gomes’ career-long fascination with the act of filmmaking, while playfully referencing the particular breed of collective tedium that many of us experienced early on in the pandemic. Displaying the mercurial nature of quarantine relationships, the film unravels like a puzzle with the title (simply “August” backwards) being only the start.
The slyly meta-cinematic experiment is set to open on Friday, May 27 at Film at Lincoln Center in New York City, via KimStim, before moving on to other cinemas nationwide. Watch the new trailer below—love the choice Frankie Valli cut, “The Night” used within—and check out the new poster as well.
