Letterboxd Season Challenge 2019-2020! Theme three, part one - a film chosen by Cahiers du Cinéma as one of the 100 essential to an ideal library!
(Chosen by me!)
The story is simple: The young man Matahi lives on the island of Bora Bora, wiling away his days amidst the springs and waterfalls with lover Reri. The chief of all tribes across the island chain has selected Reri as the new honored virgin, paragon of all virtue amongst their people, and so declared her tabu. With Matahi unwilling to accept this declaration and Reri devastated by the loss of a normal life, the two steal away through a stormy night to a nearby French colony, where they try to establish a new home. Unfortunately, the old warrior Hitu is on their trail, determined to enforce the custom of the tabu, while societal forces beyond the young couple's control seemingly conspire to bring the dreaded curse down upon their heads. Fill in key details, and you've a classic story of youth defying tradition, and learning how you can't outrun the consequences of your actions.
In Tabu: A Story of the South Seas, the details are filled by none other than F.W. Murnau (with influence from early documentarian Robert J. Flaherty), and so the yarn communicates a powerful strain of those old world sentiments through a modern medium. Having grown weary with the American studio system after his previous sound pictures bombed, Murnau fled to Tahiti for a year to make a movie his way, in the silent tradition. Though his partnership with Flaherty fell apart thanks to a disagreement in style and technical troubles in the shoot's first days, the opportunity to return to the format in which he made his clearest mark did wonders for this, his tragically final film. And not just a return to the silent tradition - the early cooperation with Flaherty and the subsequent shift to a more ethnographic approach, the employment of purely native newcomers for cast and crew, and the opportunity to experiment with his free-floating, subjective camera along new dimensions all help push Tabu to feel like a director doing whatever's necessary to draw just the right qualities from his material. Just as the cinematic verve of Nosferatu's self-moving shadows and dissolving bodies added to the film's sense of a centuries-old horror, so too do the fresh filmmaking angles here help Tabu play as a millennia-old tale with strong ties to the modern day.
You take the three elements I highlighted, and you get something like the boat-bound scenes, wherein we watch the simple act of real seafarers organizing a party to meet an inbound sailboat, for the simple sake of watching what it looks like when actual mariners from this part of the world engage in such an activity. It's enough to see them perform these actions, and enjoy the narrative twist of Matahi's little brother calling him back to the mainland at the worst time possible, but Murnau adds that key something extra by placing the camera directly on the bows and sterns. While I'm certain they were well secured (this ain't no Evil Dead running around with the camera on a plank of wood recklessness), and while we've seen cameras placed in dangerous positions many times over the years, one really has to appreciate the danger involved at this time and place in strapping a valuable piece of equipment to a pitching wooden vessel just to authenticate the shot. Even when not putting his most necessary tool at risk, Murnau is right in there with the characters, allowing the lives, habits,and ceremonies of the tribespeople dominate the first chapter of Paradise, which is far more about spearfishing and ceremonial message reading and traditional dance than it is plot. When we transition into Paradise Lost, the ethnographic elements fall away a touch, yet the sense of living a true life never goes away, regardless of how much story intrudes. After all, we're still with the same folks, and even the colonialist supporting cast hail from the region.
This, I think, demonstrates Murnau's strengths as a storyteller, and the happy accident of losing Flaherty's more overtly observational (if still well-known manipulative) tendencies. Through most scenes of the natives living and performing, Matahi and Reri are still communicating their despondency over the situation, and play out a nice little teen drama of self-pity and anti-traditionalism without uttering a single word. Though the choice to go dialogue free isn't as extreme here as in Murnau's earlier The Last Laugh - we're treated to plenty intertitles in the form of in-story letters, which I suppose is a necessary evil when trying to fully expound on some of the concepts around mandated virginity and imperialistic intersections with local values - it sure as hell works in the young couple's favor. Both because their actors rise to the occasion and give no indication they've never done this before, and because it again allows Murnau to play about with cinematic techniques to great effect. Consider the way the old warrior Hitu haunts Reri's waking eyes in every doorway, or how Matahi gets completely lost in how the colonists enable him to put on an even wilder party than those back home from seemingly the good of their hearts, only to discover later than money and debts exist. Where the thoughts and feelings of the local ship captain and outpost master are communicated through his diary, Matahi and Reri remain purely visual actors through expression and cinematic form.
And really, when it all comes to a head, it marks the themes about societal taboos and the strange power they exert over youth draws on all this to such interesting effect. I especially like the scene of Matahi's troubled dream: it's the most expressionist piece in the picture, and ties together the tribe's tabu of sullying the sacred virgin with the colonists' taboo of defaulting on your debts, by way of a third forbidden practice. Being backed against the wall, ignorant of Hitu's imminent arrival yet fully conscious of what will happen if he can't pay his bills, Matahi dreams of overlapping images, the debtor morphing into an off-limits patch of sea, where we push in through several fades to the sandy bed and the great pearls within, the largest of which grows to fill the screen before transforming back into a satisfied debtor. In effect, if Matahi can breech just one more tabu, he thinks himself set for life - the twin sharks of Hitu and the literal sharks guarding the pearls never once crossing his mind. It's a lovely sequence, and, in cooperation with how Reri's attitude towards her position changes from one of despair before she flees to one of ceaseless guilt and fear afterwards, makes clear the film's position. Even if there's no mystical force chasing down those who cross an invisible line in the sand, the sense of shame and need to continue crossing lines to stay ahead of the consequences get the job done just the same. Matahi's equally doomed by Reri's failing convictions and his decision to leave her alone to go on a risky pearl dive to save their hides as he is by Hitu's final dreaded appearance.
Now, there's places I don't think Tabu entirely works, and feels more a product of its time than an old story captured on film. Chiefly, while the accompanying score is cleverly integrated with musical cues that respond directly to the action on-screen and generally contributes to high engagement with the material, it also seems too Western in conception, too much like a Hollywood studio band blaring a marching tune of "FEEL THIS! FEEL THAT!" over Murnau and the locals' more effective filmic and acting choices. It's just a little bit too much imposition from the emerging American tradition to fully gel. One of those cases where something's good on the face and endears itself well to the crowd, but doesn't quite belong amidst the other choices.
I can't and won't say the score sinks the movie, though. It's too perfectly sharp and clear a portrait of life and tradition in Tahiti at the time through the eyes of a great expressionist mind as tempered a naturalist for "this music doesn't sound quite right for what we're doing" to even dent the hull too much. I mean, one can handily tell we're talking about a great work of art when one considers how its message boils down to "youthful rebellion cannot hope to overcome the societal forces puppeteer their lives, be it virginal traditions or colonialist capitalism," and I like it this much. Me, Mr Let The Youth Run Wild And Get The Hell Out Of Their Way. The image of Matahi struggling to keep his head above the waves as the full force of all his poor decisions and boundary crossings weigh down upon his tiring arms is too potent for me to say otherwise.
The world really did lose Murnau too soon. S'a damned shame Chaplin got to bow out of silents on his own terms with City Lights in the same year, while Muranu died and didn't have a choice in the matter. RIP to him, even nearly 90 years on.
4.5/5
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