Unfolding like an arthouse version of that joke about what you get when you play a country song backward (you wife, your truck, and your dog come back), Miguel Gomes and Maureen Fazendeiro’s “The Tsugua Diaries” chronicles a fictional 2020 film shoot abandoned due to a COVID protocol breach, in a backward-running narrative. An opening title card reads “Day 22,” and, eventually, a sequence at a time, “The Tsugua Diaries” rewinds to Day 1, the film-within-the-film gets its sound guy back, gets its permits back, and its shared sense of artistic purpose returns…
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With its inward-turned focus and quasi-incestuous relationships, every film shoot is a “bubble” to use the era-appropriate term. Still, this bubble is all but evaporated in the first scene of ‘Tsugua Diaries.’ All that remains on Day 22 is the three actors (Carloto Cotta, previously a star of Gomes’s “Tabu,” Crista Alfaiate, and João Nunes Monteiro) dancing to “The Night” by Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons. The coffee table at this taboo-busting indoor unmasked house party is covered in beer bottles. The light from outside comes through in flashes of primary color, like alternating spotlights fitted with stage lighting gels — an early example, the film’s impressionistic, resourceful and freehand naturalism. The light source is later revealed to be a lamp, its bulbs shaded by tinted orbs. When we see the lamp arrive on Day 18, we realize we’re also saying goodbye to the lighting scheme—this is one of the relatively few moments of Christopher Nolan–esque reverse-exposition in a film with many elisions and an overall sense of drift to the narrative.
For the shoot, codirectors Gomes and Fazendeiro, and their cast and crew, fulfilled the Portuguese film authority’s coronavirus health and safety guidelines and moved into the country house and grounds that is the film’s single setting for a five-week shoot over late August and early September of 2020. Shooting on 16mm, DP Mário Castanheira captures the dance of sunlight across the film grain in a warm dog-days palette; the indolent, pastoral vibe and often slack or oblique narrative reflects the setting generally (‘Tsugua’ is “August” spelled backward; the original Portuguese title is “Diários de Otsoga”), and the year of quarantining rather more acutely.
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“We decided to build a butterfly house,” João writes in a letter midway through the film, once we’ve seen the butterfly house built, though he can’t remember whose idea it was to build it. (We never find out.) The front half of the film, especially, is languid, an idyll slipping close to a longueur in which there’s nothing to do but sit in nature, strum on a guitar, take up a hobby like gardening or carpentry, or play with a pandemic pet (there are several dogs onset).
Gradually, the butterfly house disassembles, and more characters appear—or maybe reappear. No sooner have masks gone back on before Carloto, Crista, and João are at a meeting in which seeming strangers, their collaborators, discuss whether to abandon a film shoot following an exposure. These three characters are actors, evidently—or at least they are now. Here, as in Miguel Gomes’s earlier “Our Beloved Month of August” (note the title), characters seem to move freely between different tiers of the fiction.
Gomes and Fazendeiro have worked together on Gomes’s earlier films, credited to Gomes, which deconstruct film form (like “Tabu”) and narrative structure (like the ‘Arabian Nights’ trilogy). Here, they play themselves, or versions of themselves, incorporating Fazendeiro’s real-life pregnancy and cracking several slyly self-deprecating jokes about their filmmaking process. The movie-within-the-movie they’re making is described in deliberately vague terms, perhaps because the directors haven’t figured it out yet. In scenes reminiscent of William Greaves’s towering multistory metafiction “Symbiopsychotaxiplasm,” the cast and crew explore the power vacuum where they think a clearly articulated vision should be. The cast quiz Gomes and Fazendeiro on their unformed roles, only to be told that the film they’re making, like the one we’re watching, has a “reverse chronology.” The filmmakers explain that the lack of defined roles is a challenge to the very idea of characterization—only the being-in-the-moment matters.
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The three main characters are, consequently, left a little sketchy. However, there’s a perverse, subtle pleasure in seeing Carloto Cotta’s arc coalesce, and the prickly persona non grata of the early scenes reverts to the himbo alpha his cheekbones and surfboard promise. The overall slackening of cause and effect, and the fixation on everyday actions and sensations in the absence of a conventional linear journey, suggest a timely sense of malaise, of time unmoored, in which the film’s title cards literally mark the days.
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“The Tsugua Diaries” has something of a chiasmus structure, with each half of the movie, each layer of reality, and each direction of time doubling back on and rhyming with itself. Early in the film (late in the story), Carloto, Crista, and João splash in an aboveground swimming pool, which they later discover (earlier had discovered) clotted with murk and algae. A derelict swimming pool is likewise a potent image in “The Invention of Morel,” Adolfo Bioy Casares’s novel about a cinema-like apparatus of mechanical reproduction grinding down and trapping its performers in limbo, though in Gomes and Fazendeiro’s multilayered fiction, metaphors of entropy and renewal constantly intertwine. When you see the empty beer bottles strewn around on the morning of Day 2 of “The Tsugua Diaries,” you’ll realize that things are about to come full circle—talk about the Four Seasons. [B+]
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