What Is The Movie Taboo About !!exclusive!! May 2026

The central “taboo” of the film’s title is initially literal: adultery. In the conservative, dying colonial society of “Paradise,” a married woman’s open affair with her neighbor is an unspeakable scandal. Yet Gomes quickly complicates this. The real taboo is not the act of infidelity, but the act of abandoning one’s life for pure, selfish romantic passion—especially when that passion is inseparable from colonial privilege.

So, what is Tabu about? It is about a love affair, but also about an empire. It is about an elderly woman’s regret and a gambler’s tall tale. More deeply, it is a meta-cinematic inquiry into why we crave stories of forbidden passion, especially when those stories are built on foundations of silence and injustice. By splitting its narrative and bathing its colonial past in beautiful, archaic light, Miguel Gomes’s Tabu argues that the most dangerous taboo of all is the desire to remember a paradise that never existed for everyone. The film is not an endorsement of its characters’ passions, but a careful, mournful autopsy of them. what is the movie taboo about

Introduction

The film’s most profound subject is the taboo against nostalgic narrative itself. Part 2 is presented as a silent film (except for Ventura’s voice-over, the music, and diegetic sounds), shot in luscious, widescreen black-and-white. Gomes is critiquing the very form of colonial nostalgia: the way we wash painful history in the sepia tones of memory. Ventura’s story is beautiful, romantic, and utterly self-serving. He omits the violence, the boredom, and the complicity of their lives. The central “taboo” of the film’s title is