Tommy Guns / Nação Valente (Portugal, 2023)

I recently watched Jean-Denis’ A Woman Kills / La femme borreau (1968) and while A Woman Kills was made a half a century ago, during a time of revolution and independence movements–and shot during the May Paris Uprising–I think Carlos Coneição’s Tommy Guns / Nação Valente would make a good pairing with it. Both films look at violent men created in the crucible of defending colonization and empire. Both look at the damage these men and colonialism itself does to the citizens of a colonial power. The serial killer of A Woman Kills is a veteran of the French occupation of Algeria. Tommy Guns focuses primarily on young Portuguese soldiers serving under a brutal colonel (Gustavo Sumpta). 

Tommy Guns begins in the occupied colony of Angola in 1974, one year before independence. An indigenous (Mwila?) Angolan woman, Tchissola (Ulé Baldé) and a Portuguese nun wash altar vessels from a nearby Catholic church. A gunshot fires nearby. Tchissola looks up but the nun does not. The nun gives Tchissola a necklace with a medallion of St Conceição, Mary as Our Lady of the Conception. The necklace reappears in different characters’ possession and is the most consistent throughway in the film. It mirrors the the ways the women in the film are associated with maternal imagery, and Christian figures like Mary, Mary Magdalene and Saint Apollonia. Tchissola and the nun receive word that a man has been shot. The nun tries to save him, but cannot.

Tschissola and several women attempt to observer funerary rites for the man. But they are stopped from playing drums for him. As one woman says, “The white man is listening.” Drums should be played for three days to soothe an angry spirit. The women sing and hope for the best, but it is not enough. That night, the dead man rises. It’s our first hint that the dead are restless and watching in Tommy Guns.

But it is the living who are brutal and violent, not the dead–especially one Portuguese soldier who reads philosophy even as his comrades die. He later becomes a colonel–the kind who says things like, “All wars are the same.” The colonel has a small command of seven or eight men in a remote walled compound. He performs his refinement and his belief in the superiority of Western Culture in general and Portuguese culture in particular. He is bald and filled with shouting and philosophical sayings justifying his place, his compound, and his belief in fighting “the terrorists from the liberation movements in our overseas provinces,” as a young soldier Zé (João Arrais) quotes him to Apolónia (Anabel Moreira), a sex worker the colonel has brought into the barracks for his men’s “needs.” The Colonel is Kurzian, and both Apocalypse Now (1973) and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness feel very present in Tommy Guns. Perhaps J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting For The Barbarians, too.* The men train. They wait. They obey orders and fear the colonel. They endure his rages and listen to his records.

But there are other genre elements in the the film, too. There are the watching dead. They present war and colonial history as a kind of haunting or ghost story. Tommy Guns also presents colonialism and imperialism–and their white supremacist underpinnings–as a cult, showing young men indoctrinated by a middle aged man who leverages both Classical Philosophy and Christianity to justify death and destruction. And with all his will and education, all the colonel creates is death and destruction. But the young men do have a chance for a new life and atonement. It’s more than the dead have, though maybe they will rest?

I do wish the film spent more time with the traditional indigenous (Mwila?) Angolan people we first meet in the film, but then, I suppose, that would be another story** and one probably best told by an indigenous Angolan filmmaker. Tommy Guns is an interesting mix of dramatic and genre conventions. And I appreciate it contemplative pace and tone. Tommy Guns is a solid entry into the world of films addressing the destructiveness of imperialism and colonialism, especially on the men who are empowered to maintain both by force. 

*I thought a lot about Wilfrid Owens’ poem “Dulce et Decorum Est” while watching one of the scenes shot in the colonel’s compound.

** I am going to take this opportunity to once again recommend Neptune Frost (USA/Rwanda, 2021).

I received a review copy of Tommy Guns. Tommy Guns opened theatrically on April 12 at BAM in NY and April 21 at Laemmle Theaters in LA, followed by national expansion. Check your local listings.

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Carol Borden is an editor at and evil overlord of The Cultural Gutter, a website dedicated to thoughtful writing about disreputable art. She was a writer for and editor of the Toronto International Film Festival’s official Midnight Madness and Vanguard program blogs. She has written for Biff Bam Pop, Soldier of Cinema, Mezzanotte, Teleport City, Die Danger Die Die Kill, and Popshifter. She’s appeared on CBC radio, The Projection Booth podcast, The Feminine Critique podcast, the Book Club for Masochists podcast, and the Infernal Brains podcast. She’s written a bunch of short stories including Godzilla detective fiction, femme fatale mermaids, an adventurous translator/poet, and an x-ray tech having a bad day. You can find them here.