The Tsugua Diaries

Part of my coverage of the 57th Chicago International Film Festival.

THE TSUGUA DIARIES   ***

Miguel Gomes and Maureen Fazendeiro

2021

IDEA:  A film crew attempts to make a movie during COVID lockdown.

BLURB:  According to David Bordwell, art films constitute “a cinema of psychological effects in search of their causes.” Such an inverse of traditional narrative logic would seem to be literalized by The Tsugua Diaries, which presents itself in reverse chronological order. However, rather than use this structure to draw the spectator into a riddle of fractured cause and effect - an expected route for such a cerebral conceptual project - co-directors Gomes and Fazendeiro seem to have something simpler but no less evocative in mind: an undermining of our perception of time as necessarily linear and teleological. As such, the film neither begins at a recognizable denouement nor ends at the causal source of its “psychological effects”; instead of tracing its events and its characters’ relationships back to some putative origin along a cleanly sloping timeline, it charts a bumpy path of ups and downs, forward and backward movements side-by-side. In addition to being an apt depiction of the creative process, which The Tsugua Diaries is most explicitly about, this ebbing and flowing also mirrors the course of the COVID pandemic, the film’s impetus and structuring reality. Just as the pandemic interrupted the flow of daily life, so too does it intrude on and mold the course of The Tsugua Diaries, its contingencies and restrictions paradoxically fostering a sense of artistic freedom. Gomes and Fazendeiro take advantage of their improvised, cozily commune-like filmmaking retinue to create a small, nifty portrait of collective creativity, where the end product is less the point than a shared experience among friends.