Last April, I watched filmmaker Miguel Gomes’s most recent release, Grand Tour. While I didn’t entirely enjoy the film, I know Gomes is currently one of the top directors and screenwriters from Portugal. I had hoped Grand Tour would demonstrate why he is acclaimed. Given that directors often have one subpar film, for reasons within and often outside of their control, I wasn’t going to let a single work define Gomes. I recently decided to explore his “older” work. While many might start with the film Tabu, which got him in the Berlin International Film Festival, I decided to go with his three-part drama Arabian Nights: The Restless One, The Desolate One, and The Enchanted One.  In this article, I will only focus on The Restless One and leave the other two for subsequent articles.

The Restless One begins with two documentaries, one about the massive layoffs at a shipyard in Viana do Castelo and the other about the efforts by beekeepers and firefighters to kill an invasive species of hornets. Though they don’t appear connected, these two subjects are part of Gomes’ examination of Portugal’s tumultuous economy in the 2010s. Once stable industries become symbols of anxiety and European bankers operate like those pesky hornets. Soon, we are going back and forth between the subjects until Miguel Gomes himself appears onscreen. Gomes, playing himself in a meta role, is the director of the two projects. He struggles to find any connection between the two subjects (even though he clearly does), and he literally runs away from the projects. Gomes soon is captured by an unknown group and sentenced to death for not knowing the point of his projects. Gomes offers to regale tales to their captors to avoid capital punishment. Here is where the film truly begins.

For the rest of the film, Gomes uses tales and the narrative structure from the Arabian Nights to criticize what was happening in Portugal in the 2010s. The movie itself claims in a title card that this is in no way an adaptation of the folklore collection.

For the unfamiliar, the Arabian Nights folktale collection, it is an anthology of over a thousand stories within an overarching story. The narrative framework follows the Persian King Shahryar and his new wife, Scheherazade. After discovering his first wife’s infidelity, Shahryar beheaded her and vowed revenge against all women. Shahryar decrees that he will marry a woman every day and behead her by the evening, a preemptive strike against any “dishonor”. These endless killings drive most of the women out of the city and his royal court struggles to contain the king’s madness.

Scheherazade, the daughter of Shahryar’s top political advisor, volunteers to be the king’s latest bride to stop the beheadings. She keeps the king distracted by telling stories with cliffhangers, continually postponing her own execution (just as Gomes does with his own captors).  These stories are a mixture of morality tales, horror stories, satire, bawdy tales, ancient mythology, and even proto-science fiction. By the 1,001st night, Scheherazade fearfully tells Shahryar that she has run out of stories to tell. The ruthless ruler, having become wiser over a thousand and one nights, instead spares her life and renounces his misogynistic bloodlust.

If the film is entirely set in Portugal, why would Gomes pick Arabian Nights as the framework for this film? Ironically, scholars have found little evidence that the Arabian Nights collection is as appreciated in the Middle East as it is in the West. The folktales have held a grip on the West since they were translated for Europeans by Antoine Galland in 1703. There are many reasons for such fascination, ranging from the collection creating innovative literary techniques, European interest in “the Orient”, stories being both influenced by the ancient West just as much as the Ancient East, and containing stories that influenced early science-fiction and horror writers.  Such stories have also been adapted by other famed filmmakers such as Georges Méliès, Raoul Walsh, and Piero Palo Pasolini.

No doubt, Gomes himself is paying homage to cinema itself by adapting these stories. And just like Scheherazade, Gomes serves us stories of fantastic and supernatural. For The Restless One, it is only three stories: “The Men with Hard-ons”, “The Story of the Cockerel and the Fire”, and “The Swim of the Magnificents”.

The first chapter, “The Men with Hard-ons”, uses the sexual impotence of European bankers and economists as a critique of austerity measures such individuals have imposed on Portugal. During the economic downturn of 2010 to 2014, Portugal was pressured to impose deep budget cuts while also taking on additional loans. This situation would cause a cycle of cutting government budgets while also placating bankers for more funds.

In the second chapter, “The Story of the Cockerel and the Fire”, focuses on a magical and loud rooster. The poor animal is almost murdered by the town for being noisy until it pleads that it is simply warning about an arsonist on the loose. The livelihood of the rooster soon becomes a major issue for political parties in the town to campaign on, becoming a satire on politicians who wittingly offer empty promises.

The final segment, “The Swim of The Magnificents”, follows a trade union member interviewing citizens in his village about their life during unemployment. Though this chapter is the least surreal of the three stories, it certainly ends in absurdity.

With The Restless One, we see a country in turmoil. European financial institutions are hounding for debt repayment, and the working class have become aimless from unemployment and lack of purpose. It is stylistically a confusing narrative in the beginning, but the framework eventually makes sense. An issue for non-Portuguese viewers is the lack of understanding of the politics and the economy of Portugal in the 2010s. While I find some of the payoffs of the stories to be half-baked, it is still a breathtaking film and one of the most unique adaptations of the famed Arabian Nights.