Embrace of the Serpent
Directed by: Ciro Guerra.
Written by: Ciro Guerra and Jacques
Toulemonde Vidal based on the diary by Theodor Koch-Grunberg and Richard Evans
Schultes.
Starring: Nilbio Torres (Young
Karamakate), Jan Bijvoet (Theo), Antonio Bolivar (Old Karamakate), Brionne
Davis (Evan), Yauenkü Migue (Manduca), Nicolás Cancino (Anizetto), Luigi
Sciamanna (Priest Gaspar).
There
is so much to like about Embrace of the Serpent, that you want to overlook the
parts of its that try too hard – the parts that underline the themes of the
movie, than circle back to underline them again. It’s a film that wears its
influences on its sleeve, and perhaps would have been better served by
referring to them just a little bit less often – or at least in less obvious
ways. All of that is a shame because the black and white photography in the
film is beautiful, and the dual narratives do an excellent job making
everything clear without co-writer/director Ciro Guerra doing all the work for
the audience himself.
The
film is about dual journeys up the same river in Colombia, South America, approximately
40 years apart. In 1909 Theo (Jan Bijovoet) is dragged ashore by his assistant,
Manduca (Tauensku Migue) to see Karamakate (Nilbio Torres) – the last member of
his tribe, and perhaps the only man in the jungle who can save the European
explorer’s life. Karamakate has some sort of white powder that he blows into
Theo’s face as they journey up the river, looking for a mythical plant that can
cure him – running into various people along the way. Decades later, Evan
(Brionne Davis), an American studying psychedelic drugs, wants to find the same
plant Theo was chasing, and once again gets Karamakate (now played by Antonio
Bolivar) to guide him up the river. Karamakate claims to no longer know where
he’s supposed to go – but does believe the two men are the same person.
Embrace
of the Serpent’s main theme is about colonialism, obviously, and how the
natives in South America were essentially bulled over by white settlers – who,
in the case of this movie anyway, either had good intentions, or no clue of
just how destructive their presence was going to be. Embrace of the Serpent
makes this clear as the journeys mirror each other, and we see the effects of
events in the first journey during the second. Most notable of these is the
dual scenes at a Christian missionary – the first, where the white settlers are
imposing a harsh version of Christianity on the “savage” natives – and later,
when we see the although the natives have taken over, they’ve grown even more
violent - or as Karamakate describes it – “the worst of both worlds”.
It’s
in scenes like that where Embrace of the Serpent works best. Where it stumbles
a little is when Guerra gives speeches to Karamakate, who basically just tells
the audience what the themes of the movie are, and what it all means. These
dialogue scenes are clumsy and unnecessary – and there’s more than one of them
as well.
Watching
the film, you’ll recognize the influences on Guerra and his style – from ethnographic
documentaries to the collected works of Apichatpong
Weerasethakul to Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, and especially the
works of Werner Herzog – his two river based masterpieces, Aguirre the Wrath of
God and Fitzcaraldo, in particular. The film tries to reference these films and
move on – but sometimes, the references are a little too on the nose (when a
care breaks out a record players on the river, for instance, it’s a clumsy
reference to Fitzcaraldo).
There is enough to like about Embrace of the Serpent
to make it well worth seeing – any film with black and white photography this
good is more than worth seeing (and it’s good enough that I now really regret
missing it when it was in theaters). It’s a flawed film to be sure – but one
that makes me interested to see what Guerra does next,
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