★★★
There is a case for comparing Embrace of the Serpent with the new Tarzan movie. Both dwell on the sins of colonialism and both take as their heroes a man brought up in the jungles of a wild continent. But one film is a Hollywood product. The other comes from a place as far from Hollywood as you can get while still using a camera to tell a story.
Shot in luminous black-and-white in the Colombian Amazon, Embrace of the Serpent looks like a series of animated photographs torn from the colonial explorers' journals that inspired it. One of these men, Theodor Koch Grunberg, was a German ethnographer who travelled through the Amazon in 1907. The other, Richard Evans Schultes, an American botanist, made his trip 20 years later.
But we're piloted through the film's narrative twists by Karamakate, a tribal shaman who comes across them both, impressing them with the force of his contempt for the white man while reluctantly agreeing to instruct them in the secrets of the jungle habitat that has sustained his people for generations.
Colombian writer-director Ciro Guerra intercuts the two journeys and divides the role of Karamakate between two actors. Nilbio Torres, who lives in the Amazon and has never acted before, plays him as a young man, strong, muscular and secure in his mastery of his heritage, which includes the power to heal. And Antonio Bolivar Salvador is the elderly Karamakate, still living alone and self-sufficient yet conscious of the fact his memory is failing. He agrees to help Schultes (Brionne Davis) to find the plant he is after only because he wants to see if the search will make him remember.
We start with Theo (Jan Bilvoet), who has been brought to Karamakate because he's desperately ill with fever. Together, they set off down the river to find the medicinal plant he needs. It's a voyage that segues abruptly between the dreamy and the nightmarish. There are tranquil scenes of their boat gliding across the limpid surface of the river, punctuated by horrific encounters on the river banks as the travellers are conducted through a kind of Dante's Inferno of colonial atrocities and their aftermath.
It's far from being a bloodbath. Guerra prefers the single telling image to the extended horror show, but there are a few Grand Guignol flourishes.
It all makes for a strangely overwrought experience. No matter what happens, Karamakate remains a remote figure with a cultivated air of mystery, and the two explorers are stock characters. Theo's single-minded drive for knowledge has turned him into a glassy-eyed mystic, while Schultes, who's working for the rubber companies, is the corruptible truth-seeker, caught between science and commerce.
It's a little too neat and there are too many long, slow stretches inviting you to contemplate the fact. But visually, it's stunning.
