In 1974, after 400 years of control, Portugal is preparing to withdraw from Angola. On the ground, however, tension and violence reign. Thus this young black villager is machine-gunned by a Portuguese soldier after he had seduced her… At the same time, in an army training camp, a despotic colonel intends to make “men” from the gang of children entrusted to him. Between warrior story and fatal dream, surreal flashes and bloody outbursts, Carlos Conceição offers, with Tommy Gunsa bewitching polymorphic work.
Opposing the horror of war with a marked formal beauty in order to exacerbate, through a game of contrast, said horror is not a new process. In his second feature film, Carlos Conceição summons in turn Terrence Malick and his poetic The Thin Red Line (The thin red line) and, in a more lyrical vein, Sam Mendes and his 1917. At times, the infernal aura ofApocalypse Nowby Francis Ford Coppola, soars.
It is in this case in the metamorphosis that the vision of Carlos Conceição, filmmaker born in Angola, but who grew up in Portugal, finds its singularity.
This is a film whose identity is never fixed. In the second act, for example, while most of the action takes place in the training camp, we see a kind of variation of Full Metal Jacket, by Stanley Kubrick: from recruits whose innocence is crumbling to the berserk colonel who commands them. By constantly filming the young men in groups, as if they were posing for an improbable masterpiece, Carlos Conceição simultaneously defuses and magnifies the reference.
The events and the reactions to them seem, moreover, out of step, in addition to being punctuated with unusual or anachronistic elements: on purpose, Carlos Conceição blurs the border between reality and fantasy. In the same perspective, the filmmaker willingly resorts to symbolism. One thinks of this immense “Trumpian” demarcation wall of which we no longer know, like the soldiers, if it is there to prevent people from entering or leaving.
Turns and Transformations
In the third act, a prostitute comes to the camp to deflower the recruits: the sequel is almost like Fassbinder. Then suddenly Tommy Guns is transformed again, into a horror film for the account, with living dead, full moon and all.
Far from being clumsy, this new turn has — do we understand a posteriori — been negotiated from the first minutes, in a subtle way, with here this bad dream in which the hand of a dead man springs out of the ground, or there this strange passage where the murderous soldier reads quietly in the shade of a rock while a comrade-in-arms is shot a few meters from him.
This umpteenth tonal reconfiguration further reaffirms the filmmaker’s intention. Namely to translate in a striking and visceral way the stupidity and the monstrosity of the war, colonialism and racism inherent in this ideology.
Here again, the message is not new, but it must, alas, be perpetually recalled. Faced with the perennial inability of human beings to learn from their past mistakes, Carlos Conceição opts for a stimulating rather than a pontificating approach. The result certainly provokes reflection, and has the good fortune to fascinate.