CAPSULE: Embrace of the Serpent (2015, Dir. Ciro Guerra)

Echoes of Joseph Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness' and Miguel Gomes' Tabu reverberate through Ciro Guerra's Cannes' lauded Embrace of the Serpent (El abrazo de la serpiente). Diving headfirst into the ravages of colonialism, Guerra's film, based on the diaries of two botanically minded Western explorers spaced four decades apart, connects the past to the present in a way that shows, often quite viscerally, how the manifold ugliness of misguided "civilising" can fester.

At the heart of the film, Karamakate (Antonio Bolivar), a Amazonian shaman who acts as guide to both explorers. He's not immune to the encroachment of Western influence, in fact, he is, in many ways, the personification of it. Wiped of his history, reduced to attempting to recapture his cultural memory by retracing drawings on the river's rockwalls, Karamakate is a man adrift. When botanist Richard Evans Schultes (Brionne Davis) arrives with a set of notebooks from Theodor Koch-Grunberg (Jan Bijvoet), an explorer Karamakate once led on a desperate hunt for a life-saving flower (played then by a stately Nilbio Torres), he finds himself being guided back through his own history in a journey of violent reconnection.

Guerra's dual narrative provides a compelling internal counterpoint. The parallels the two stories come into clear focus as each party travels up the river. The film slides seamlessly between the two, documenting the downward drag of the rubber wars, religious missionaries and general cultural superiority.

Despite the film's bubbling vitriol, Guerra maintains a reasonably cool distance, not least in his decision to shoot the film in black and white. David Gallego's photography stuns regularly but usually through its starkness; the film recalls Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev more readily than it does, say, Herzog's Fitzcaraldo. This is, I'd hazard a guess, rooted more deeply in the film's DNA than just the film's palette, with Guerra more intrinsically concerned with the transcendence of culture and more inclined to play both worlds on equal footing. Karamakate's art, like Rublev's, is to be celebrated (in all its hallucinatory glory), even though one is waxing where the other wanes.

But these are nuances of form and theme that, while thrilling at times, sometimes get away from Guerra. For all its successes, Embrace of the Serpent still stumbles in its balancing of character and polemic. There are moments where actors turn mouthpieces, or flip too quickly from desperate journeymen to cultural warriors. The desperation drives this, to a point. But it also jars.

There can little doubt that Embrace of the Serpent is an achievement, or that it has more to surrender from its eddying depths. It is a film that doesn't wash from the memory as quickly as a first viewing would have one expecting. In this it transmits its scars well.

★★★☆

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