Movie Review: Birds of Passage

Birds of Passage **** / *****

Directed by: Cristina Gallego & Ciro Guerra.

Written by: Maria Camila Arias & Jacques Toulemonde Vidal and Cristina Gallego.

Starring: Carmiña Martínez (Úrsula), José Acosta (Rapayet), Natalia Reyes (Zaida), Jhon Narváez (Moisés), Greider Meza (Leonídas), José Vicente (Peregrino), Juan Bautista Martínez (Aníbal), Aslenis Márquez (Indira), José Naider (Miguel Dionisio), Yanker Díaz (Leonidas as a Child), Víctor Montero (Isidoro), Joaquín Ramón (Gabriel), Jorge Lascarro (Sigifredo), Germán Epieyu (Minister), Luisa Alfaro (Victoria), Merija Uriana (Herminia). 

 

In many ways, the Colombian film Birds of Passage traffics in gangster movie clichés – you’ll find elements of The Godfather or GoodFellas or City of God throughout the terrifically entertaining film. Yes, you can complain about some of that – or the fact that the movie includes not one but two hotheads who do stupid things that screw everything up (like Tommy DeVito in GoodFellas or Lil Zee in City of God), or some of the coincidences in the plot. Yet the film works despite those minor issues, in part because the film is so well made and entertaining, but even more because it uses this backdrop to get us inside a culture we haven’t really seen on screen before – the indigenous Wayuu, of Northern Columbia, who for generations withstood outside forces who sought to control them or bring them down. The threat in Birds of Passage comes from within, as these things often do, when drugs and money become involved. The film is based on events that happened in the 20-year span between 1960 and 1980 – and if you know anything about Columbia you know it got worse from there. Here, the drug of choice is marijuana – not cocaine – but the resulting violence is the same.

 

The film doesn’t start off as a gangster movie – it starts off immersing us in the Wayuu culture – where young woman Zaida (Natalia Reyes) is set to having her coming out as a woman – ready to be married. Rapayet (Jose Acosta), a poorer man from a lesser family, immediately makes his intentions clear – he wants to marry Zaida. Zaida’s powerful mother – Ursula (Carmina Martinez) – who runs her family – isn’t convinced, and sets the dowry for her daughter ridiculously high as a way to put off Rapayet’s advances. But he is determined – and soon finds his way to get the money he needs. He has been dealing in coffee and alcohol – but seizes an opportunity when he hears some Americans in the Peace Corps want pot – a lot of pot. His uncle grows pot – and he can fix it so they can all make money. Soon, he is selling all his uncle to grow to Americans – who export it back to their country in planes – and things are good. He is married to Zaida, he is making more money than he can needs, and has become a powerful man himself. His hotheaded, non-Wayuu partner Moises (Jhon Navaez) then goes ahead and screws everything up – and while Rapayet pieces things back together, it sets the stage for another screw-up – Leonidas (Greider Meza) – a decade later – to eventually screw everything up beyond repair.

 

The film was directed by Cristina Gallego and Ciro Guerra – who previously made the visually stunning Embrace of the Serpent – a black and white film that I admired visually more than I enjoyed. Here, they are working in color, and the story is stronger. They are painting on a vast canvas here – with many characters, over the span of more than a decade, and they never get lost in the weeds of the story (this is why some of those clichés and coincidences work – they help move the story along). In many ways, the gangster story here is familiar – regular guy, Rapayet, gets involved in crime, becomes bigger than he could ever imagine, but sees it all destroyed by the end – as things have spiraled into violence, greed and death. The element of the Wayuu make the film feel unique. The Wayuu are a tradition bound people – and a superstitious one. They have a way of doing things – beliefs of ghosts, and dreams as omens, word messengers that must be respected, etc. The Wayuu doesn’t rely on outside people to help them solve their problems – and they don’t trust them either. There is a tension between the old and the young here – Ursula believes wholeheartedly in the Wayuu way – but Rapayet and Zaida are trying to be, at least, somewhat more modern. What good will being Wayuu do them is it will end with them getting killed? It turns out, of course, that the way of the Wayuu only works when everyone respects it – which is easier to do when things are going well. By the end, the Wayuu may not be destroyed – but part of them has been – and no one really seems to want to deal with it. The dead have piled up.

 

Birds of Passages isn’t a perfect movie – as mentioned, it probably relies on clichés a little too much (having both Moises and then Leonaidas set in motion massive violence pretty much singlehandedly feels like a stretch). And Zaida, who we get the impression early will be a major character, is relegated to the background very early – and it’s impossible to get a handle on her as a character. And yet, it’s a fascinating, entertaining gangster movie throughout – one with more going on than normal. It is also brilliantly directed by Gallego and Guerra – who present the violence, but don’t glamorize it – much of it either happens in a flash, or off-screen. The big climax happens in a longshot, and a flash to the aftermath. They treat this story as the tragedy that it is – so even with the clichés, you feel the immense tragic nature of this story – and what has been lost.

Movie Review: Embrace of the Serpent

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,