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Film review: Embrace of the Serpent

With its trip down river through dense jungle to a freakish mission run by a megalomaniac with a god complex, there’s more than a hint of ‘Apocalypse Now’ in writer-director Ciro Guerra’s stunning exploration of the devastating effects of colonialism on the Colombian people.

Jul 28, 2016, updated Jul 28, 2016

However, despite some disturbing scenes of madness, mayhem and child abuse, Embrace of the Serpent is a more gently poetic film than Francis Ford Coppola’s dramatically lurid masterpiece.

Shot on 35mm film and primarily in black and white, the movie is inspired by the real-life journals of explorers Theodor Koch-Grünberg and Richard Evans Schultes. It traces two parallel journeys down the Amazon – one in 1909, the other in 1940.

It begins when German explorer Theodor (Jan Bijvoet) and his aide Manduca (Miguel Dionisio Ramos) arrive looking for the shaman Karamakate (Nilbio Torres), who they believe can help them find the yakruna plant that will save the desperately ill Theo.

Decades later, American botanist Evan (Brionne Davis) arrives, looking for Karamakate’s help to retrace Theo’s journey. He has “dedicated his life to plants” and hopes to find the mythical yakruna that eluded Theo.

However, the older Karamakate (Antonio Bolivar) is a different man. He has forgotten the meaning of the symbols he draws on the rocks, he can’t remember how to find the yakruna, and he has lost much of his indigenous culture. He describes himself as chullachaqui – an empty spirit who looks like Karamakate but is not the real Karamakate.

While Theo manages to catch only a glimpse of a sort of chullachaqui version of yakruna (a version cultivated for recreational use), with Evan’s encouragement, Karamakate finally remembers how to reach the site of the last true yakruna. It’s a revelation that shows how shared knowledge rather than cultural domination can lead to a greater, more magnificent understanding of the universe. Instead of being left, like Kurtz, with “The horror! The horror!” Evan is left (literally) standing among butterflies.

The film opens with a quote about the Amazon from the diaries of the real ethnographer Koch-Grünberg, whose account informed the film’s script: “I cannot begin to describe in words its splendour and beauty. All I know is that when I came back I was a changed man.”

It closes with Karamakate urging Evan to share his newfound knowledge: “Tell them everything you see, everything you feel. Come back a whole man. Give them more than what they asked for. Give them a song.”

What Guerra has delivered is an extraordinary cinematic song that focuses ultimately not on the “heart of immense darkness” that devastated the indigenous people of Colombia, but the spirit of explorers like Koch-Grünberg and Evans Schultes who were ready to learn from the different cultures and experience the beauty and splendour of their world.

 

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