The Last Time I Saw Macao

Part impressionistic essay, part sci-fi noir nonsense, and part political commentary, The Last Time I Saw Macao plays like a shotgun wedding of arbitrary narrative and generally random images. Portuguese filmmakers João Rui Guerra da Mata and João Pedro Rodrigues open their experimental film with a playful nod to Josef von Sternberg's 1952 thriller about mistaken identities, Macao, presenting transsexual Cindy Scrash as a buxom singer lip-synching to Jane Russell's performance of "You Kill Me" from Sternberg's movie. It turns out Scrash is playing a character named Candy here, although the audience only hears her disembodied voice for the duration of the film. Through enigmatic messages, Candy instructs off-screen narrator/co-director Guerra da Mata to save her from a noir-ish fate that is vaguely like Russell's situation in Macao. None of which makes Last Time I Saw Macao a successful homage to a minor classic; instead, it's nearly an act of found art with a chicken-or-egg riddle: did the directors dream up the wispy, loony plot (which also involves human zealots turning into animals) to mischievously link a lot of meaningless shots, or did they have a story to present elliptically? Either way, the novelty wears thin after 30 minutes of often tourist-y footage of Macao's streets, parks, swanky hotel lobbies, and grim alleys. Da Mata's world-weary reflections on the identity of Macao (or Macau)—a former Portuguese colony in China that, like nearby Hong Kong, now has a degree of autonomy—are too thin to tell us much about the region or its existential dilemma as a semi-independent territory. Optional, at best. (T. Keogh)