is set in contemporary Lisbon. It follows Aurora, an elderly, cantankerous widow, and her pious, frustrated neighbor, Pilar. Aurora’s life is one of mundane misery, gambling debts, and fantastical complaints—until her final days, when she begs Pilar to find a man named Ventura, a mysterious figure from her past. This section is grounded, neorealist, and suffused with a quiet melancholy about modern loneliness.
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. what is the movie taboo about
The lovers’ “Paradise” is only possible because of the brutal system that surrounds them. Black African servants and laborers are silent, background figures—picking up laundry, serving drinks, rowing boats. Their oppression is the hidden foundation upon which the white protagonists’ emotional drama is built. The film suggests that the passionate, transgressive love between Aurora and Ventura is itself a product of colonial escape. They are not rebelling against empire; they are fleeing deeper into a private fantasy of it, a “paradise” that was always an illusion. is set in contemporary Lisbon