With a gorgeous black-and-white cinematography and an impressive thematic rigor, this is a welcome surprise of tremendous poetry, a film that confronts frustration and memory as a lyrical homage to silent movies accompanied by a haunting narration.

"Tabu" starts with Pilar(Teresa Madruga), a middle aged woman, watching a period piece about a tropical explorer who kills himself after being confonted by a ghost. In real life, she is stood up at the Lisbon airport by a young Polish woman she was hoping to host. That leaves her plenty of time to cope with Aurora(Laura Soveral), her elderly neighbor, after Santa(Isabel Cardoso), Aurora's maid, alerts her to her going to a casino where she promptly loses all of her money before possibly pawning her furs for a return trip. Pilar is in charge because Aurora's grown daughter made only a hasty visit when she returned to Portugal for the holidays to visit her husband's family. "Tabu" is a beguiling allegory about how Portugal deals, or does not deal with, its colonial past, as the past seems insistent on returning to haunt the present. For example, Aurora is not merely going senile but becoming her younger self again.(That might explain a crocodile making an appearance in both the prologue and the second half. Or maybe the director just likes crocodiles.) By contrast, Santa and Pilar seem intent on breaking such a cycle; Santa by reading 'Robinson Crusoe' while Pilar takes up various forms of activism. As time moves day by day in the present and by the month in the past, both have a lovely colorless dreamlike intensity while the past has sound effects, musical numbers but no dialogue. At least in Portugal, they take down their Christmas decorations in a timely fashion.