Critics reviews

Like Scheherazade, [Gomes] spins his yarns as a distraction for his safety, but one could also read Arabian Nights as a testament to the capability of stories and even the airing of grievances to sidetrack people from taking necessary action. The final installment of the trilogy shows Gomes working his way back to the real world after disappearing from it for hours, only to find that he can be just as experimental and fanciful as he was in the trilogy's most abstract moments.

Scheherazade's adventure is a playful tangle of anachronisms. But charm dissipates with the final story, an overlong documentary-style portrait of a working-class bird-trapping community. Tonally, it's reminiscent of Raymond Depardon's glum portraits of French rural life, spiked with surreal flashes. If this was Scheherazade's final story, it would have been unlikely to stave off her execution.

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.

It is the most beautiful portion of the entire six-hour "Arabian Nights" project. Full of gorgeous people and vistas, hilarious tangents and washed over with a diffuse longing. Gomes plays with the traditions of the past and the tangible facts of the presents, hoping for a brighter future for his homeland.

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.

Arabian Nights' off-the-cuff, community-theater vibe ends up underlining its origins as a creative reaction to social and economic crisis. The movies may be, in part, about fantasy, but they always look like they're from somewhere very real.