It’s
the Portugueseness. Macao seems to exist
in a state outside of time and geography, serving as a perpetual cultural
crossroads for tourists and migrant workers.
It is the perfect place for a film noir, precisely like von Sternberg’s Macao.
Despite their references to Jane Russell’s character, the approach of co-directors
João Pedro Rodrigues & João Rui Guerra da Mata is radically dissimilar. Narrative is something that happens outside
our field of vision throughout The Last
Time I Saw Macao (trailer
here), which
opens tomorrow in New York.
As
the film commences, a transvestite night club performer lip-synchs “You Kill
Me,” Russell’s big musical number from said Hollywood programmer. Get a good look at Candy, because she is the
first and last character to be seen in LTISM. Instead, the Joãos use voice-over narration,
overheard phone calls, and disembodied dialogue to tell their tale of
post-colonial intrigue.
The
narrator, “Guerra da Mata,” grew up in Macao, but spent the entirety of his
adult life in Portugal. He has finally
returned home in response to a call for help from his expat friend Candy. She has always been attracted to the wrong
sort of men, but this is a particularly bad case. Assuming she has fallen in with some sort of
criminal gang, the unseen protagonist becomes entangled with a Chinese Zodiac
cult and a caper involving a strange birdcage (not unlike Pulp Fiction’s suitcase).
That
might sound like manic b-movie material, but J.P.R. & J.R.G.M. banish all
the action off-screen. Instead, they
give the audience an impressionistic tour of Macao, via a series of darkly
evocative Ozu-esque pillow shots. Fortunately,
they have a keen eye for visuals. Many
individual sequences are quite striking, but eighty-five minutes of such self-referential,
self-consciously elliptical filmmaking gets rather wearying over time. Frankly, Rodrigues & Guerra da Mata’s
abstract style of film noir would arguably work better as a short film, which
has been the form of their previous collaborations.
