Critics reviews

Gomes welds two major stylistic and directorial strands he has manifested in his previous works into an unified directorial vision: the magical realism of his so-called musical comedies such as A Cara que Mereces (The Face You Deserve, 2004) and the docu-fiction of Aquele Querido Mês de Agosto (Our Beloved Month of August, 2008).

Its sheer scale and the mishmash of storytelling forms and styles command a certain admiration, but it's hard to shake the feeling that Fernando Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet would have provided a stronger conceptual foundation than Arabic folktales do.

Coscripted with Mariana Ricardo and Telmo Churro, the films deftly blend political satire, escapist fable, and reporting on the unemployed... The films are enchanting for their irony, their humanity, and their reflexiveness.

A three-part, six-hour, funny, sad, ambitious, and frequently bewildering epic... Gradually it becomes clear that Gomes isn't out to make a grand political statement, but rather to create a sweeping mosaic that reflects the confusion and vitality of life at the moment of the work's creation. In this regard, ARABIAN NIGHTS suggests a cinematic analogue to the Clash's triple album Sandinista! (1980), replete with in-jokes, sloganeering, and passages of failed experimentation.

Viewed through the haze of Gomes's film, the book emerges as a sumptuous, hyper version of the filmmaker's previous works—above all, in the way that it offers lessons in stories that require the presence of another story: a work as an anthology. Gomes has always enjoyed combining two separate elements in a single film, and in Arabian Nights this technique is cosmically expanded. Each new story stylistically corrects or contradicts the story preceding it.

Arabian Nights might be the clearest expression of Jean-Luc Godard's ‘every film is a documentary' adage since the French master's own work in the late 1970s and 80s. I find it most satisfying to view Gomes' film-thing as an almost ridiculously thorough nonfiction self-portrait of cinematic structures and ideas, laid bare in a specific place at a particularly sensitive moment in that place's political history.

It will take several more viewings to begin to come to terms with Gomes' sprawling, six-hour, three-part epic of storytelling, documentary, political fable and autoportrait. And those four genres just scratch the surface of the fantastical and fantastically rich complication of visual and sound fantasias that Gomes puts into play... This deliriously overstuffed text extends what we imagine cinema can encompass, and dissolves boundaries that prevent us from thinking radically about our world.

Gomes knows how to wrap an audience around his little finger—see Tabu for reference—but conscientiously keeps himself from slipping into a rhythm here, switching up time signatures in unexpected ways. These films are the work of a free man, and the exhilaration is infectious.

The result is a thing of structural complexity, at times seemingly postmodern long before the modern even existed. One Thousand and One Nights is a dense, dizzying knot of nested stories that, taken as a whole, is as much an exploration of storytelling as it is a vast catalogue of human nature.

With its wildly associative structure, leapfrogging genres and modes of narration, the film functions, as Gomes says, as a kind of encyclopedia, a seemingly inexhaustible portrait of a world in which surrealist fantasy and nuts-and-bolts neorealism are inextricable fellow travelers, where wizards, phantom dogs, teleporting bandits, exploding whales, and subcultures of working-class bird-trappers coexist.

Abstraction gives me vertigo," Gomes claims in a deceptively modest voiceover early on, before starting and restarting and interrupting his work with Godardian abandon. Rarely does a movie open with such a sense of anything-could-happen possibility, as The Restless One lays out a palimpsest of reality, imagination, and human identity.

Part one of "Arabian Nights" has many wild components and even though they adhere to their own set of aesthetic principals, they make for a strange two-hour movie. And yet this buffet of colorful characters and gently surreal symbols all bear the unmistakable stamp of Gomes, the restless one. His retelling of Portugal's identity crisis is glued together with his wry sense of humor, cinephilia and knowledge of the seductive allure of all things untouched.