Embrace of the Serpent (El abrazo de la serpiente) dir. by Ciro Guerra (review)

At a pivotal moment in Ciro Guerra’s Embrace of the Serpent, the anthropologist Theo, traveling into the furthest reaches of the Amazon in 1909, realizes that his compass has fallen into the hands of a group of natives. As he desperately wants to retrieve it, his guide, the shaman Karamakate, laughs at him and calls him “such a white man.” The anthropologist, sounding like he has rehearsed Star Trek’s prime directive, insists he cannot leave the compass behind because traditional methods of navigation (“these people navigate by the moon and stars”) would be forgotten. Laughing again, the shaman tells him: “You can’t forbid them to learn, white man.” With that simple line—and perhaps even more with that laugh—Karamakate annihilates the misconception so central to imperial vision, of indigenous people as pure and untainted and changeless.

As their journey up Amazon River in search of the magical yakruna flower that Karemakate believes will heal Theo proceeds, the two repeatedly encounter evidence that such untainted purity has long since been lost. From the outset, Karamakate recognizes his traveling companion as a white man, and identifies the culture of which he is a part. Rubber barons have decimated the wilderness and brutally subjected the indigenous peoples to forced labor on their plantations. A Catholic missionary’s school for orphaned natives works by brutal forced conversion and the mandated abandonment of native ways (“pagan tongues,” traditional dress, and all the rest). Local habitations have been supplanted by shabby European-style huts. Karamakate condemns Manduca, Theo’s native guide, for having “submitted to the whites without a fight.” But whether fighting accomplishes anything is also unclear. When Theo and Karamakate reach the end of their journey, even the magic plant has been ravished, forced against the sacred tradition into cultivation, and its caretakers reduced to drunks, their own ways abandoned. By the time of the film’s second journey upriver, thirty-some years later—an older Karamakate guiding Evan, another white man in search of the same mysterious flower—he is the last of his people, the Cohiuano doomed to die with him. (Antonio Bolivar, who plays the elder shaman, the director has noted in interviews, is among the last few dozen people of his own Ocaina tribe). The changes wrought by the European encounter suffuse the film’s landscape; a compass at this point cannot possibly do more harm.

For far too long, at least since Joseph Conrad sent Marlow upriver to seek out Kurtz in Heart of Darkness (1902), literature and film have been sending white men into the exotic/savage wilderness to find themselves or to lose their soul. Almost any savage wilderness will do: Africa served the purpose for Conrad, as it would for Kevin MacDonald for Last King of Scotland (2006) and Bob Rafelson in Mountains of the Moon (190). But Francis Ford Coppola had no difficulty translating Conrad’s tale to Vietnam in Apocalypse Now (1979), and John Huston employed the far less jungly wilds of Afghanistan to similar purposes in The Man Who Would Be King (1975). Filmmakers before Guerra have set such tales in the Amazon as well, most notably Roland Joffé in The Mission (1986) and Werner Herzog in his two epic tragedies of adventurers into lunacy, Aguirre: The Wrath of God (1971) and Fitzcarraldo (1982). The masterstroke of Guerra’s film is that it inverts this over-familiar trope, turning it inside out, so that white men’s journeys are imbedded in a framework of indigenous understanding.

Both Theo and Evan think they are seeking their own truths: Theo as anthropologist collecting information and photographing Amazonian peoples (and now seeking the one indigenous drug, the yakruna flower, that might keep him alive); Evan, over thirty years later, hunting for that same plant, ostensibly because of its psychotropic properties (more covertly to assist the war effort, at a time when the need for rubber substitutes was high). But Karamakate...