Arabian Nights: Volume 2, The Desolate One

For all the film’s politics, Arabian Nights can also be whimsical, swooningly romantic, inspiring, fascinating, or deeply sad.

Arabian Nights may frustrate and enervate, but with hindsight these blemishes fade into a gleaming collage.

The melancholy that falls over this chapter is hard to shake but its tempered slightly by the love Gomes has for his characters, bad habits, ingrained sadness and all.

Volumes one and two are especially captivating, as Gomes himself appears onscreen to tell of how he charged a team of researchers with scouring Portugal in search of tales.

Gomes believes we should all take responsibility for one another and sees austerity as a government abrogation of social duty that ultimately turns citizen against citizen.

It is worth sticking with it until the end, since the third part is the most powerful.

It forays into satirical terrain in order to elide actual dealings with the problems at hand, so that each piece feels alternatively frivolous and weighty.