Embrace of the Serpent (2016) [Blu-ray]
Adventure | Drama | History
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Tagline: As rich visually as it is thematically, Embrace of the Serpent offers a feast of the senses for film fans seeking a dose of bracing originality.
Embrace of the Serpent, a complicated mixture of myth and historical reality, shatters lingering illusions of First World culture as more advanced than any other, except technologically. Where Majesty Meets Monstrosity. This film is the more
remarkable for being shot in black and white, with one brief color sequence near the end. Beautiful isn’t a strong enough word to describe its scenes of the heaving waters of the Amazon and its tributaries, on which two explorers, separated by more than
30 years, navigate in canoes, accompanied by a shaman, Karamakate.
Storyline: The story of the relationship between Karamakate, an Amazonian shaman and last survivor of his people, and two scientists who work together over the course of 40 years to search the Amazon for a sacred healing
plant.
Reviewer's Note: Reviewed by Michael Reuben, June 30, 2016 Embrace of the Serpent grew from the desire of writer/director Ciro Guerra to explore the history of the Amazon jungle region that covers half of his native
Colombia. Guerra calls it "a green sea . . . that unfathomable land that we foolishly reduce to simple concepts: Coke, drugs, Indians, rivers, war." Part of the challenge of delving into the region's history is the dearth of written records. The Amazon
has been transformed by modernity, eliminating dozens of indigenous tribes that once occupied the surrounding rainforest, along with their knowledge and oral histories. Among the few surviving accounts are the journals of two 20th Century explorers, who
recorded their search for the rare yakruna plant, which grows on rubber trees and is said to possess both healing and psychedelic properties. Drawing on these explorers' writings, Guerra has crafted a mystical and poetic work that provides glimpses of an
alternate reality. The film's images linger in memory long after the credits roll.
Embrace of the Serpent was Colombia's official submission to the 2016 Academy Awards, where it was selected as one of the five finalists for Best Foreign Language Film Oscar. (It lost to Son of Saul.)
Guerra's film unfolds in two distinct time periods. In 1909, an ailing German explorer named Theodor von Martius (Jan Bijvoet, Borgman) searches for the yakruna plant, which he believes will heal him. Theo is accompanied by Manduca (Yauenkü Migue),
a native of the region whose back bears whipping scars from time spent as a slave on the region's rubber plantations. To help them find the yakruna, Theo and Manduca enlist the aid of Karamakate (Nilbio Torres), a healer and shaman known as a payé.
Karamakate believes himself to be the last surviving member of the Cohiuano tribe, but Theo insists that there are others. If Theo is right, the surviving Cohiuano are likely to have yakruna.
In 1940, another German explorer, Evan Shultes (Brionne Davis), retraces the steps outlined in Theo's journals, which were sent back to Germany after his death. Evan finds the elderly Karamakate (now played by Antonio Bolivar), who believes himself to
have been transformed by age and isolation into a "chullachaqui", a kind of empty shell that wanders through the jungle like a doppelganger. Old Karamakate says that his memories are gone and that he doubts whether he even exists. Indeed, when he
and Evan first meet, Old Karamakate is surprised that he can be seen at all. Evan, too, is searching for yakruna, but for a different reason than Theo. Rubber trees bearing yakruna plants yield a higher quality of sap, which Evan has been asked by his
government to locate to aid the war effort. It gradually becomes clear, however, that Evan is engaged in a personal quest in addition to his government mission, and these objectives will ultimately conflict.
As Embrace of the Serpent shifts fluidly between its two time periods, Guerra creates a sobering portrait of a region once rich with a thriving culture but now decimated by colonization and profiteering. Some of the devastation is literal, as
illustrated by the rubber plantation encountered by Theo and Manduca, where a horribly maimed slave tends the pots gathering sap from trees. (Manduca, who once performed the same job, reacts with grief and fury.) Other changes are subtler: Theo
reluctantly surrenders his compass to the chief of a tribe he encounters, even though he knows that its use may cause the tribe to abandon and forget its existing system of reckoning direction by wind and stars, which requires no equipment. The mixed
blessing of Christian missionary work is revealed during a visit to a school run by a Catholic priest, who protects native children from the rubber trade, but then disciplines them with a whip, just like the rubber barons. Years later, Karamakate returns
to the same locale, where a mad Spaniard has declared himself the new messiah and has gathered fanatical followers around him, like some Latin American variation of Joseph Conrad's Kurtz.
Whether as a vigorous and mocking young man or a weary and resigned old one, Karamakate serves as a reproachful witness to the irreparable change wrought by outsiders upon his land and culture. Nine languages are spoken in Embrace of the Serpent,
but differences in native tongue are the least of the gulfs that divide Karamakate's world from that of the white men who visit him. Karamakate does not experience the world as they do, and director Guerra expresses his separateness not only through the
expressive faces of the two actors playing the dignified payé, but also through expressive black-and-white images of the river, the dense jungle and the stark mountain peaks to which Evan ultimately journeys. Guerra's decision to photograph the
Amazon's spectacular scenery without the benefit of color was a bold one, but it pays off admirably, as the director transforms the landscape into an alien world of light and shadow haunted by its former inhabitants, who are disappearing even from
memory.
Embrace of the Serpent opens with a quotation from the explorer on whom the character of Theo is based, and it aptly sums up the experience that the film aspires to create for its viewers: [T]he display I
witnessed in those enchanted hours was such, that I find it impossible to describe in a language that allows others to understand its beauty and splendor; all I know is that, like all those who have shed the thick veil that blinded them, when I came back
to my senses, I had become another man.
Guerra has employed the resources of cinema to render Theo's sensation palpable in a way that the original explorer could never have imagined. Highly recommended.
[CSW] -2.4- Yes it captures beauty, wisdom, healing and splendor along with philosophy, lost culture and poignant cinematography, but if you haven't seen and recognized all this before seeing this film then you desperately need to watch this film. If on
the other hand you are pretty much aware of all-of-the above then all you will get are two hours of radiant black and white cinematography and a blend of fact and fiction of a lost and dying culture. I don't mean to say that as a trivial thing but the
same thing could be said of the Aztecs, American Indians, etc., and it was even the main storyline in the movie Avatar.
[V4.5-A4.0] MPEG-4 AVC - No D-Box.
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