Tabu: A Story of the South Seas (1931)

After catching fish, young men wash off in a waterfall, as one does. Realizing that young ladies are bathing upstream, they sneak up and kidnap them. I may be misunderstanding this part of Polynesian courtship. Anyhow, a white man’s boat arrives carrying an elder from another tribe. He reads a scroll written in French. It’s unclear what it says but judging by the tonal shift in the film’s score, it does not bode well for our young kidnap victim.

Tabu is essentially a silent film with a synchronized score. There is no dialog and the only thing resembling a title card is when written words are shown on camera. I was about a third through the film that I realized turning on closed captions would translate them. The Amazon version seemed to be missing about nine minutes. A copy on youtube appears to be complete and shows translated text without resorting to closed captions. Amazon Prime fails me again.

Here "Tabu" means forbidden, but with a tribal enforcement aspect. Because pretty young Reri is promised to a powerful chief, it is Tabu for another man to express interest in her. Also, don’t dive for pearls where sharks are known to swim. Safety tip. It’s also taboo to build a house on ancient burial grounds as Directory F.W. Murnau did. This, along with his manner and how the natives were depicted, caused significant friction with the local population. He would die before the film’s release. And so it goes.

A great number of films were made exploiting the young, pretty, and topless ladies of the south seas. While I don’t think that was the intention of this film, it might be their spiritual granddaddy. That said, there isn’t a whole lot of story here. Boy kidnaps girl, girl is promised to powerful chieftain, they run away together, then face the consequences. The classic tale. More so than nudity, the film exploits their exotic otherness. See the native peoples and their strange ways. Nanook director Robert J. Flaherty, no stranger to exotic otherness, was supposed to be co-director. He quit after butting heads with Murnau.

Filmed almost thirty years prior to Hawaii’s statehood, audiences ate it up, even though the fairly sparse nudity had been edited out. Today the novelty of seeing Pacific Islanders is not a thing, so Tabu offers little for modern audiences. And, truth be told, while it is interesting, it's not that interesting. AMRU 3.