The Tsugua Diaries Review: A Reflexive Look at Isolation and Artistic Purpose

Maureen Fazendeiro and Miguel Gomes’s The Tsugua Diaries is something like Memento for an age of isolation and listlessness. The film proceeds backward in time, delivering a denouement in its first scene that only begins to acquire sense in retrospect as the viewer is shuttled along its timeline in the wrong direction. Unlike Christopher Nolan’s thriller, though, there’s no murder at either end of this story. Fazendeiro and Gomes aren’t even primarily interested in reversing the narrative logic of cause and effect. Instead, they retrace with droll humor the schisms wrought by the global pandemic, and then proceed to unravel all conceivable distinctions between the story of the film and its making.

The action of the first scene is continually reframed by the knowledge gleaned from the multiple embedded flashbacks that follow. A man who we eventually learn is called Carloto (Carloto Cotta) finds himself dancing alone, on some kind of patio in the woods, to a Franky Valli song. He looks around and espies through a screen window his two missing compatriots, soon to be identified as Christa (Crista Alfaiate) and João (João Monteiro), sharing a kiss.

Is this a love triangle? Carloto doesn’t seem happy, but he’s hard to read, and the initial flashbacks frustrate any desire for clarity. When Carloto suggests throwing a party, João complains that parties are “just people talking and no one listening. I get bored.” But, then, in the scene from a few days earlier, Carloto delivers the exact same spiel when João and Crista propose a party, undermining the seeming genuineness of João’s later complaint.

When we hears Carloto’s identical whine about his purported distaste for parties, it almost seems less like João is mocking Carloto and more like they’re both tossing off lines from a rehearsed speech, like a script. And, indeed, it will turn out that this is a trio of actors out on a shoot that seems to have been derailed by a Covid-19 scare, provoked by Carloto leaving the quarantined set against regulations. In the meantime, they decided, on Crista’s initiative, to build a butterfly house (hence all the screens). Of course, due to the story’s structure, we see them constructing it well before it’s explained what they’re going to have built.

Plot, though, isn’t primary in The Tsugua Diaries. Other threads that we can trace backward through time—like the origins of some rotten fruit that we initially see when Crista’s hand arranges it into a moldy still life in close-up—focus us instead on the relationship between environment and character. Moreover, the film is full of beautiful, sumptuous imagery that the filmmakers seem to linger on at least partially out of pleasure in the image itself, like in a late-film (read: early-story) moment when the trio looks out through a telescope at a wondrous, obviously animated nighttime sky full of colorful shooting stars.

A meeting between the film-within-the-film’s cast and crew—circa day 10 out of 22—even provides The Tsugua Diaries’s anti-plot thesis statement, with the co-writer (played by Fazendeiro and Gomes’s very own co-writer, Mariana Ricardo) explaining to Cristia that “the very sequence of events, or the events themselves, may not be what gives a character direction.” Turns out, the focus of the film-within-the-film’s narrative will be on the tasks out of which a character is built, like the making of a butterfly house.

It’s around this point that the ouroboros-like structure of The Tsugua Diaries becomes clear, as the movie that the co-writer describes must be none other than the movie we’ve been watching. We’ve flashed back to before the movie, and yet we’re still within it. Perhaps this is what’s signaled by the layered screens of the butterfly house we glimpse early on, as the fuzziness of the light that marks those scenes mimics the warm, slightly grainy look of The Tsugua Diaries. Wherever we look, there’s a fuzzy screen between us and the object of our vision; like the infinite stack of turtles that hold up the world, it’s screens all the way down.

The film’s juxtaposition of Covid isolation and inescapable meta-textuality can be, for making us feel perpetually stuck, as frustrating as it is clever. But the film’s use of its, let’s say, anti-linear structure, which continually peels away our framework for understanding earlier scenes, proves intellectually engaging. More than that, The Tsugua Diaries is carried by an abiding love for the image that’s evident in the way Fazendeiro and Gomes both assemble a record of pandemic-era filmmaking and simply delight in their film’s warm colors and the way it captures passing time. Isolation has been difficult, but at least, for now, there’s still cinema.