Eugène Green’s The Tree of Knowledge offers us, in movie form, the sad spectacle of a man who insists on cracking jokes without realizing that no one at the table is so much as chuckling. Surrounded by nothing but yellow smiles, every one of his jests landing to complete silence, he persists with his show, completely oblivious, and perhaps indifferent, to reality. At some point, in the middle of all your frowning and eye-rolling, you will maybe feel guilt: shouldn’t you be more charitable? But the suspiciously reactionary content of what he’s saying will ultimately give reason to your impatience.
15 minutes into The Tree of Knowledge, faced with the undisputable evidence of bad dialogue, cheap lighting, and half-baked, well-trodden ideas, there isn’t much doubt left as to whether the film is worth the ticket. 30 minutes in, faced with the endless procession of self-consciously intellectual and referential jokes, a terrible impatience creeps in. But around the 40-minute mark, when the film’s naïve, unremarkable criticisms of modernity and capitalism begin to take an undeniably reactionary appearance, viewers will lose any remorse they might have had and accept that The Tree of Knowledge is nothing less than atrocious.
One can excuse bad comedy and bad dramaturgy; one can excuse cheap costumes and cheap sets; one can excuse even inane though honest criticism. But what one cannot excuse is someone making the argument that the decline of the West began with Republicanism and the French Revolution when we know very well that 200 years before the Marquis of Pombal was even born, Portugal had already invaded America and Africa, begun to systematically kill the Amerindians, and had enslaved the Africans. Whenever someone begins feeling too nostalgic for Monarchy, it’s usually because they are choosing to see rupture where there is in fact deep continuity. The partisans of the old West, who love to point fingers and have eyes for nothing but breaking points — ignoring everything that led to them — should try for once to acknowledge the role this old West had in its own decline. How could we be surprised, then, that at the end of the The Tree of Knowledge, the solution Green offers to our very real problems is as trite and useless as… “love”? By this point, he’s already made a point of showing how blind he is to the world, and how little it interests him.
The problem is not so much that the cheap costumes look cheap, but that sunlight itself does. The problem is that these awkward, clichéd, and intentionally naïve dialogues should be spoken with such grandiosity and pomposity that we get the impression this is all an elaborate parody. The problem is that Green doesn’t seem to have a single idea, makes an entire movie out of only the lamest bromides, and still, somehow, thinks he’s apt to offer solutions and answers. Thank you, but we don’t need them. If he wants to complain about ugly tourists that flock to his once beautiful Portugal — a very real problem, of course, but one to which he has absolutely nothing interesting to add — then he’s welcome to sit in a bar of his choice, surrounded by like-minded men who’ll offer him nothing but encouragement, and spend the afternoon babbling about. Frankly, he doesn’t need to make a movie.
Lucky for us, there’s an infinitely superior film to come out of Portugal this year that also offers a(n infinitely more relevant) critique of modernity. Rita Azevedo Gomes’ Fuck the Polis not only refuses to simplify reality in order to give absurd solutions no one asked for in the first place, but it’s also profoundly, effortlessly funny. So instead of watching The Tree of Knowledge and seeing the sad spectacle of the decadent criticizing decadence, go check out Fuck the Polis. And in the case you’ve already seen it, well, watch it again. Endless repeat viewings would still offer a better use of your time than suffering a single experience of The Tree of Knowledge.
Comments are closed.