If you're going to shoot a movie in black-and-white, you ought to have a good reason. There are many good reasons to choose from, such as, things can be made to look creepier. Or, it's easier to pretend we're in "the Past," since photographic records, which some people confuse with reality, were in black-and-white for so long. Paintings were in color for much longer, and in many respects remain truer witnesses. Never mind. There's also the economic factor. Whatever his excuse, director Ciro Guerra shot his on-location rainforest movie in a palette of gray, grayer, grayest, white, off-white, dark gray, and black. Colombia's Oscar contender, Embrace of the Serpent opens Friday at Opera Plaza.
The Amazon Rainforest, where Serpent is set, is amazing. Two million square miles of rainforest sit in nearly three million square miles of basin. Nine countries lay claim to a piece of this miracle of natural life and native forestry, with Brazil taking the lion's share of 60%. Almost 400 billion trees, which scientists have assiduously classified into 16,000 species, represent over half of all the rainforest humans have so far failed to eradicate from the face of the earth. One/10th of all known living animal species reside here, 1/20th of all birds and fish. In other words, if there's one place on earth worth saving, this is it.
Serpent is, thankfully, not a conservation rant. Serpent is a polemic about the white man's imperative to throw his baggage into the river and paddle up or downstream with his native guide in quest of healing and altered consciousness. This story has been told many times in many ways. It never gets old because white men never learn. White men are hell-bent on their and everyone else's destruction. Donald Trump is simply the latest in a long, sorry line of wrong-headed technocrats. It's not like the world doesn't "need" to be reminded. It's merely a question of whether you feel like sitting for 125 minutes staring at black-and-white images of the most vibrant, fertile, color-saturated biome in the universe.
Maybe Nature would've gotten in the way of the plot. Serpent is the story of the white men in the life of an Amazonian native. One white guy, a German, arrives when Karamakate is in the prime of perfectly muscled nativeness; the second, an American, when our hero is old. These two pale-face bookends are no doubt essential to selling the film to what's commonly known as "a wider audience." Maybe what's meant is "a whiter audience." The white men aren't very interesting. They both have beards, look lost, are lost, worry a lot, and obviously need the help of a noble savage to get back on their feet and perhaps connect with the sweet mystery of life.
Karamakate is a tease, like all good spirit guides. "I don't help the whites," he snarls in a thrilling prologue before the opening credits. But, like all good movie Indians, he's also weak. He can't hold to his convictions. And that's a good thing, because it turns out that was his ego talking. By film's end, Karamakate has come 180 degrees around and can say, without irony, to the second white guy, "I wasn't meant to teach my people. I was meant to teach you." This is such a familiar Hollywood trope, it's dismaying to witness it wrapped up in Colombian trimmings, in hopes of an Oscar, clearly labeled "authentic."
The MacGuffin, as Hitchcock would say, is an elusive tropical psychotropic plant called yakruna. Lots of paddling, not too much botany, a little meandering on paths, goes into locating the last specimen. Too bad the flowers are so obviously pasted on. Along the way, there are echoes of Werner Herzog and Joseph Conrad in this double quest. Because he's hungry, the German parks their canoe at a Catholic mission over the protests of Young Karamakate. The detour sets up a blistering portrait of Catholic missionary toxicity, when a needless-to-say sadistic padre whips naive little Indian children for speaking their own language. Years, even a century later, the Bostonian repeats the detour. The cult has devolved into a weird-ass Messiah-based suicide cult, perhaps a nod to Jim Jones' Jonestown massacre. Old Karamakate sagely observes, "They are now the worst of both worlds."
Behind the Catholics are the rubber plantations. We get glimpses of this further desecration of forest and indigenous people. Guerra has his work cut out for him, condensing into two hours the crimes of centuries of colonization. Raising the consciousness of the willfully unconscious is a laudable quest. In the movie, the transaction is one-on-one. In real life, there aren't enough guides to go around. The process must be accelerated. And fast. Serpent attempts to deliver a message repeatedly delivered and ignored. That's all a messenger can do.