“Everybody’s lonely, worried, and sorry.
Everybody’s looking for something.”
– Jane Russell in Macao
The Last Time I Saw Macao begins as another of João Pedro Rodrigues’ erotic nocturnes, in a darkness that recalls the impenetrable nightscapes of his first feature O Fantasma, his tale of a gay Lisbon garbage collector on the
prowl for both refuse and sex. The narrator of The Last Time, the film’s co-director and
Rodrigues’ longtime partner João Rui Guerra
da Mata, is also on a quest through a shadowy
urban terrain, on a rescue mission to save his
old friend Candy, who has become the target
of a Zodiac cult in Macao. The obscurity in
The Last Time, however, is as metaphoric as
it is literal: the city ends enshrouded in mist
and smoke, much as the narrator spends the
film adrift in a miasma of memory. In the provisional
precincts of both Macao and The Last
Time, all dissolves into uncertainty.
In this city of cul-de-sacs and hideous casinos
Guerra da Mata is warned that “nothing
is what it seems,” and indeed, in a film of
false starts and unclear allegiances, little turns
out to be as it first appears. Accoutered with
two enigmatic preludes, the film keeps shifting
genre and register within its strictly controlled
monotone, conflating not only fiction
and documentary but also what seem half a
dozen sub-types of each: conspiracy thriller,
neo-noir, city symphony, travelogue, apocalyptic
sci-fi, autobiography, essay film, experimental
home movie, meta-memorial, and
cultural critique. Running a scant eighty-five
minutes, The Last Time I Saw Macao achieves
immense density through this amalgam of
genre and its tight braiding of at least three
strands of history: personal (Guerra da Mata’s
childhood in Macao), political (Macao’s
four-hundred years as a Portuguese colony
before the handover to China in 1999), and
cinematic. Opening with a double homage—
to Werner Schroeter’s masterpiece The Rose
King, shot in Portugal, and to Josef von Sternberg’s
orientalist adventure, Macao—the film
then proceeds to a desultory staging of a gun
battle that looks back to the opening military
gambit of Rodrigues’ To Die Like a Man. Consciously
or not, The Last Time invokes countless
other films, ranging from Chris Marker’s
La Jetée and Sans Soleil (Time’s most obvious
analogue in both tone and modus) through
any number of Hollywood noirs (particularly
Kiss Me Deadly), and employs imagery that
recalls directors as dissimilar as Apichatong
Weerasethakul (synchronized exercisers in a
city square) and Michelangelo Antonioni (the
portentous post-apocalyptic finale that recollects
L’Eclisse). The baroque, paranoid wit of
Orson Welles surfaces more than once; the
directors evidently remember The Immortal
Story, in which Welles recreated Macao in the
Spanish town of Chinchón using Chinese
waiters from Madrid. Rodrigues and Guerra
da Mata thus manage to fashion a labyrinth
that suggests both Marker’s vortices of time
and memory (the film is full of temporal
markers: watches, clocks, and countdowns)
and Welles’ sinister, centerless mazes. If one
finds the labyrinth over-contrived, it’s best to
remember Jane Russell’s own counsel in Macao
as she snarls at Robert Mitchum, “It’s all a
matter of taste.”
The film’s overture, in which Cindy Scrash
erratically lip-syncs Jane Russell’s rendition
of “You Kill Me” from Macao in front of a cage
of cavorting tigers (courtesy of Lisbon’s Victor
Hugo Cardinali circus), joylessly squeezing
the taut drums of her breasts encased by a
cheongsam—a camp signifier of eastern “exoticism”—
initially seems a trick beginning, but
actually introduces many of the film’s motifs
and meanings, most obviously the character
of Candy and the shoes and wig that will
comprise her last vestiges on earth. The tigers
portend The Last Time’s copious, escalating
animal imagery—Rodrigues’ oeuvre constitutes
a bestiary, especially of cats, dogs, and
birds—and emphasize the rampant facsimile
that turns nature to its opposite in the city:
Macao’s ubiquitous tigers are all fake and
paper, crumpled and upturned in an entropic
late montage, before the film’s final imagery
suggests that after nuclear mishap the human
world cedes to the beasts. The emphasis on
performance and mimicry in Candy’s act pervades
the rest of the movie: Macao decked out
in Christmas drag, peopled by a little girl in a
Santa costume vamping for the cameras and
a Venice-looking, Sinatra-sounding gondolier
serenading his canal with a full-throated
“Smile”; the Cantonese opera on television
that Guerra da Mata attempts to decode as
he awaits Candy’s phone call; the empty stage
at the Jai Alai casino with its glittery curtain.
So, too, Candy’s transsexuality signals the
film’s many references to the liminal: its own
breached threshold between fiction and documentary
and its shifting, shared narration
between the two directors’ voices; the hybrid
Portuguese-Chinese traces of Macao’s colonialist
past; the buxom mermaid in the video;
and even the sundry nature of the 1952 RKO
film so insistently invoked by Rodrigues and
Guerra da Mata, which was partly directed by
Josef von Sternberg and finished by Nicholas
Ray.
“I see I’ve left nearly everything unsaid,”
the doomed Candy scrawls in her farewell
letter, and much the same can be said of the
film she appears in (or mostly doesn’t), a work
of absence and emptiness, severe ellipsis and
truncation. Rodrigues and Guerra da Mata
refuse to reveal much of the characters’ bodies
after the initial preludes, an abbreviation
that is probably not, as many critics have
claimed, a deployment of the trademark isolating
frames of Robert Bresson (though the
directors greatly admire his work). Rather,
in its arch mysterioso, the reliance on hands
and shadows reads as a playfully exaggerated
trope from noir, especially given the film’s
conspiratorial narrative about the “great
ritual of the chosen ones” that looks back to
The Big Sleep and The Lady from Shanghai in its
twisty inscrutability, and the cloaked birdcage
modeled on the mysterious nuclear whatzit
in Kiss Me Deadly. However, like Bresson and
his countless copiers, the directors rely on an
implicative sound design to insinuate all that
we cannot see, including Candy’s murder.
What the directors do show in a succession
of glorious Marker-like static shots of Macao
(and other Chinese sites cobbled to make a
more “exotic” locale), employing grates and
grilles to replace the scrims and screens synonymous
with von Sternberg, reveals a keen
eye for symmetry and kitsch: the spume of
sparkles illuminating the gauche façade of
the Grand Lisboa Hotel framed by Guerra
da Mata’s inn window, with an Ozu-like pair
of slippers propped against it; a sienna retrofuturistic
double phone booth by the waterfront;
the crimson, heavily jeweled talons of
Madame Lobo fingering toy wooden animals
that represent her cult, her victims, or both;
the discarded high heel that becomes a synecdoche
for Candy’s demise; a latticework
of glistening fish in the market. The directors
interpolate actual photographs from
Guerra da Mata’s childhood, mostly fading
Polaroids, into their montage--our first view
of the Macao bay, for instance—as markers of
the intertwined pasts of a person and a place
that, three decades after his departure, contains
few traces of his former life there. The
upside down television in Guerra da Mata’s
cab suggests an oblivious, topsy turvy world,
but off-season Macao emerges in the film
more as the Capital of Desuetude, where the
past emerges superfluous, disused, or otherpurposed.
Rickshaws are now just for tourists
and the Portuguese language has quickly disappeared
after four centuries of use. The narrator’s
childhood school has become a collection
site for rubbish. The old seawall on Praia
Grande Avenue, now land-locked, no longer
serves to protect the city from the water
and stands lonely and neglected. Guerra da
Mata’s former home, the Moorish Barracks,
has been declared a World Heritage Site by
Unesco and the Military Club is now deserted,
populated only by the ghosts of former Portuguese
officers. (Candy resides on the Travessa
de Saudade, an address that translates roughly
as Melancholy Way, a jokey reference to the
dolorous Portuguese sense of loss and longing,
sometimes associated with the decease
of the country’s colonies.) Most errant of
knights in a city that stymies his every move,
the inept narrator proves incapable of saving
Candy from her fate. “Candy was dead.
She asked me for help and I failed,” Guerra
da Mata intones in the lugubrious voice that
passes for hardboiled in this mock-noir. Why
Candy ever implored help from the gormless
would-be gumshoe, who repeatedly gets lost,
even when his destination is close by, or stuck
in traffic, who misses a crucial rendezvous after
forgetting his cell phone and can’t manage
to elicit directions or evidence from any passersby,
counts among the film’s manifold (and
amusing) mysteries. When Candy counsels
the hapless one to save himself from Madame
Lobo’s henchmen, his hitherto infelicidade
suggests he’s wise to hightail it out of Macao
for the last time.
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James Quandt is Senior Programmer at TIFF
Cinematheque in Toronto, where he has curated
several internationally touring retrospectives, including
those dedicated to Naruse, Mizoguchi,
Bresson, Imamura, Ichikawa, and, most recently,
Oshima. A regular contributor to Artforum Magazine,
Quandt has also edited monographs on
Robert Bresson, Shohei Imamura, Kon Ichikawa,
and Apichatpong Weerasethakul.