‘I Only Rest in the Storm’ Review: A Didactic Portrait of Post-Colonial Relations

Sérgio (Sérgio Coragem), the Portuguese protagonist of Pedro Pinho’s I Only Rest in the Storm, goes to Guinea Bissau to write down an impression report of a road-building venture. There he encounters many extraordinary people that exist principally to conspicuously problem age-old European prejudices about Africa. And but, nobody actually causes Sérgio to query his presence in their world. In Pinho’s story, modern-day colonial preparations proceed to pitch West Africa as a Las Vegas-like playground for white males to take advantage of.

Everybody would look like suspicious of Sérgio, a self-righteous normie who roams round his new environment as if affected by melancholia. In fact he’s sexually drawn to Black our bodies, and his two principal objects of attraction in the movie are two particularly transgressive varieties: a non-binary Brazilian exile, Guilherme (Jonathan Guilherme), and a socially acutely aware intercourse employee, Diára (Cleo Diára), whom he meets as she’s attempting to flee a person following her via a market. Collectively, they dance, kiss, trade erotically charged barbs, and have intercourse.

Although Sérgio retains looking for refuge in Guilherme and Diára’s hedonism, as if attempting to flee the sterility of his work setting, he by no means snaps out of a depressive state. Perhaps, like us, he’s suffocated by the didacticism that everybody round him is vulnerable to. No matter the post-colonial classes are, I Only Rest in the Storm’s characters articulate them too evidently, as if preemptively justifying the making of a movie in or about “Africa” on the situation that the white man’s presence is relentlessly denounced. The filmmakers are clearly crucial of the colonizer’s mindset, however they’re so adamant about ensuring that we all know their stance that just about each sequence right here is structured round a form of ethical self-disclosure.

The unique title of I Only Rest in the Storm is O Riso e a Faca, which accurately interprets to The Laughter and the Knife, and it establishes the type of binarity that displays the movie’s shortcomings, because it by no means fairly goes past the pitching of oppositions. In a single scene, a West African particular person wonders if it’s true that in Portugal rest room water is sweet sufficient to drink and, in response, Sérgio asks if all West Africans can have three wives. That is additionally evident in the necropolitical violence of Sérgio’s road-making venture (he’s not allowed to supply his water bottle to a thirsty native, as a result of “guidelines are guidelines”), which is simplistically contrasted with the queer debauchery of the events he attends with Guilherme and Diára, the place sharing is caring.

Pedagogy even has to share house with the carnal frisson of the dance ground, with partygoers chatting about the colonial aggression of the Portuguese and resistance to it. And a sequence the place locals are seen prepping goats to be slaughtered turns into a chance for Sérgio and Guilherme to struggle over which of the goats they might select to save lots of: a black or a white one. In fact the white man picks the white goat and the Black particular person picks the black one.

I Only Rest in the Storm’s on-the-nose academic thrust reaches its climax when Sérgio tells Diára that he refused a bribe of 150 thousand Euros to hurry his highway growth report as a result of corruption is disgusting. She turns into outraged since what’s truly disgusting is folks being cursed as a result of of the place they have been born and never having their fundamental wants met. Elsewhere, she tells him that he has “no thought what it’s prefer to be me” after chastising him for not caring about the working circumstances of intercourse staff, the well-being of ladies in Guinea Bissau, human trafficking, and clear water for everybody.

It’s solely in the uncommon cases when Pinho and co-writers Miguel Carmo, Paul Choquet, and Luís Miguel Correia take an in depth have a look at colonial relations however chorus from indicating which aspect they’re on that the movie succeeds. That’s, when somebody, as a substitute of beginning a sentence alongside the strains of “After the Europeans got here to the African coast…,” says one thing that guides somewhat than instructs. Like in an surprising, and deliciously aimless, sequence towards the finish of the movie when, randomly, Diára asks Sérgio to look at one of her shoppers have intercourse together with her. The voyeurism, scripted by the girl’s personal need, organically results in a bisexual threesome, with the white man’s physique sandwiched by the Black ones, lastly lowered to their plaything.