Cert 12A
122 mins
BBFC advice: Contains moderate violence, injury detail, threat
I was aware of the hullabaloo of acclaim surrounding Ciro Guerra's hugely ambitious Embrace Of The Serpent.
So, am I allowed to say that I found it stodgy going for the frst 20 minutes or so? Indeed, I wondered what was going on.
However, once I had acclimatised I was able to appreciate its great depth.
The movie focuses on Karamakate, an Amazonian shaman and last survivor of his people played in youth by Nilbio Torres and older by Antonio Bolivar.
He was a guide to two separate explorers - Theodore Koch-Grunberg (Jan Bijvoet) in 1909 and Richard Evans Schultes (Brionne Davis), 40 years later
Filmed in black and white, Guerra's movie flicks between the two journeys, alighting upon their similarities (both were punctuated by potentially dangerous confrontations with local tribesmen or outsiders who exploited the forest for rubber) and differences
Both Koch-Grunberg and Schultes were keen to find a plant which had the reputation for curing all illnesses. However, their guide is reticent about leading them to it for fear of the consequences.
Along their treks, the very different life perspectives come to the fore with the shaman's deep understanding of nature juxtaposed with the white man's sensibilities.
Torres and Bolivar are revelations in the key roles. Their performances are so good that this could easily be mistaken for a documentary (there is scarcely anything in the film which dates any section).
And this is a film which should make us feel guilty. In our name, others have invaded and destroyed a habitat in which indigenous people had lived for many thousands of years,
I have never before lifted an entire director's statement about a film but I was so moved by Guerra's that I found it appropriate.
He said: " Whenever I looked at a map of my country (Colombia), I was overwhelmed by great uncertainty.
Half of it was an unknown territory, a green sea, of which I knew nothing.
The Amazon, that unfathomable land, which we foolishly reduce to simple concepts. Coke,
drugs, Indians, rivers, war.
Is there really nothing more out there? Is there not a culture, a history? Is there not a soul that transcends?
The explorers taught me otherwise. Those men who left everything, who risked everything, to tell us about a world we could not imagine. Those who made first contact during one of the most vicious
holocausts man has ever seen.
Can man, through science and art, transcend brutality? Some men did.
The explorers have told their story. The natives haven’t. This is it.
A land the size of a whole continent, yet untold. Unseen by our own cinema.
That Amazon is lost now. In the cinema, it can live again."
After that, there is really nothing to add.
Reasons to watch: really gets to the heart of the rape of the rain forest
Reasons to avoid; gets off to a bewilderingly strange start
Laughs: none
Jumps: none
Vomit: yes
Nudity: yes
Overall rating: 8/10
Star tweet
Daniel Miller Embrace of the Serpent - the kind of Shamanistic journey that turns people into anthropologists - go see.
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