Driving home from the Gold Coast Arts Centre after seeing this, it dawned on me that I was enmeshed in a culture that represents the very antithesis of what this inescapably sad movie looks back to with sorrow and yearning. As a eulogy for ‘the songs we will never hear’, Colombian director Ciro Guerra takes us deep into the Amazon jungle and the disappearing world of the shaman Karamakate (Nilbio Torres as the younger, and Antonio Bolivar the older).
Based on the 1906 diaries of Theodor Koch-Grunberg (Jan Bijvoet), colonialism, exploitation and Christianity have already had their catastrophic impact on the Indians of South America when he arrives in search of a rare, healing plant. At first unwilling to act as his guide, Karamakate thinks of himself as a hollow man, no longer able to understand the language of the birds, flowers and trees with which he was once so familiar. ‘Something has gone wrong,’ he laments. But accompanied by Manduca (Yauenkü Miguel), Theodor’s servant, they set off up river (like Willard in Apocalypse Now). Their journey is inter-cut with another traveller’s quest for the same plant, following in Theodor’s footsteps decades later and once again employing Karamakate – the seamless casting of Bolivar and Torres as the same person is uncanny.
Guerra has shot his film in glorious, shimmering B&W, ostensibly because the overwhelming greenness of the Amazon basin caused too many visual problems in establishing depth and definition. But the monochrome also ads authenticity to the story, setting it firmly in a lost age that existed before lurid technicolor and in-your-face CGI. With entirely natural performances, this is a wondrous film of intense sensuousness and enchantment – Theodor’s song and dance for the Indian children is utterly joyous – but also of regret and ignoble savagery – the separate episodes at the Catholic mission are a shameful indictment of the cult of Jesus.
Ultimately we are left with the confronting truth that, despite our civilised ways and technological advances, an obsession with materialism, with owning ‘things’, has diminished us irreparably. Travel to see it.
