Failure, Erasure, and Oblivion in Joâo Pedro Rodrigues and Joâo Rui Guerra da Mata’s Asian Trilogy: Red Dawn, The Last Time I Saw Macao, and Iec Long

Abstract

João Pedro Rodrigues and João Rui Guerra da Mata’s “Asian Trilogy” comprises the films they co-directed in and about Macao, the former Portuguese enclave in southeast China. The films are relative oddities in the directors’ filmography, especially when contrasted with the flamboyant melodramas that preceded them (Odete [Two Drifters, 2005] and Morrer Como um Homem [To Die Like a Man, 2009]) and the oneiric, spiritual odyssey that followed them (O Ornitólogo [The Ornithologist, 2016]). While Rodrigues is the exclusive director of these better-known feature films, the “Asian films” are joint directorial efforts with Guerra da Mata, Rodrigues’s art designer and occasional co-writer. The existing literature on the trilogy has had surprisingly little to say about the films' queer affect; fails to explore the peculiar reading of contemporary Macao in the films; and passes over its cataclysmic temporality and apocalyptic ending and its related animal subplot. These disparate thematic strands are the main strands pursued in this chapter. They will be explored through the lens of what Judith Halberstam has identified as “the queer art of failure”. Failure in the film – or in Halberstam’s work – is not a trait to be decried; as it blocks the habitual avenues of identification and intelligibility, it promotes alternative paths of desire and cognition. Failure in these films affects personal and collective identity. It plagues the protagonists' lives and defines Macao as a living space that is oppressively fixated on novelty and as the endgame of decolonization and of former emancipatory projects. The Macao of the films is caught in the cyclical temporality of underworld ritual murder, mindless renewal, neo-capitalist spectacle, and gambling. Like its protagonists, Macao has nowhere to go but into the evocation of a past that can only be recreated as a bygone utopia or as a tourist attraction, or into a post-human future where people have vanished and only animals remain. The Last Time I Saw Macao is the central, lengthiest, and most complex piece in the trilogy and its concerns radiate to the other two titles. For this reason, it is the point of entry into the analysis of the three films.