Pia Marais’ Transamazonia seeks to connect us to its characters and the environment containing them, but we leave the film far more imprinted by the latter. The fourth feature by the South African-born and -raised filmmaker (but whose work feels truly, fittingly transnational), she aims to create an emotionally involving story, with rooting interests for sympathetic individual and collective groups––here, the indigenous Assurini people of Trocará, Brazil. But it’s really more effective as a mood piece, the thematic clash between empiricism and superstition emanating like gun smoke from the depths of its jungle setting.
Marais is esteemed on the festival circuit but has been less well-served for theatrical distribution; her 2007 feature The Unpolished, which won the top prize at Rotterdam, is one of the more underrated debuts of its decade. A tough and tender memoir of growing up with very bohemian parents, its highly personal look at a challenging, stimulating upbringing is echoed by Transamazonia’s own plot, beginning in the aftermath of a plane crash, where a young girl, Rebecca (played as a teenager by Helena Zengel), is the miraculous sole survivor. Her mother, a nurse, has died, leaving her the sole custody of her skeezy, yet oddly principled father Lawrence (filmmaker, performance artist, and irregular actor Jeremy Xido), who runs an evangelical mission largely attended by the indigenous population. With Rebecca’s survival attracting local media attention and fascination, she’s alleged to have curative, faith-healing abilities, which seem far-fetched. But the film is appreciably unworried about trying to debunk them.
Transamazonia is concerned with unveiling Brazil’s unique balance of cultures, belief systems (extending to extractive capitalism), and locals, but it’s also undeniably an outsider’s view, giving it a kinship with the older-fashioned but still forceful perspectives of Conrad’s colonial fictions and Claire Denis. The crux comes when Alves (Rômulo Braga), a logging magnate, seeks Lawrence and Rebecca’s help to wake his wife from a coma; with a slight echo of Winter Light, this is a task Lawrence is glad to accept in any case, fostering his ego as a self-styled “shaman of the jungle” (with his duet folk performances with Rebecca at his sermons’ ends having an air of Charles Manson). But Rebecca herself is exploring her origins––e.g. her mother’s own reason for initially being in the country––and her consciousness is being raised by her burgeoning friendships with younger members of the Assurini tribe, such as Silas (Hamã Luciano); Alves is involved in ransacking the forest for his business, leaving the indigenous people displaced, but claims he will relent if his wife is cured.
It is literally in the film’s title: whilst it derives from the Brazilian Transamazonica Highway, which cleave north and south parts of the forest in two, Marais also sees her setting as a “zone” à la Tarkovsky’s Stalker, an enclave bathed in a similar nauseous green where miracles are sought and metaphysical desires addressed. But there’s no traveling sequence: it’s the film’s entire reality, maybe enveloping that of Brazil, where charismatic faith leaders hold still enormous sway and integrate with the contemporary far-right responsible for the country’s Bolsonaro era.
But as seen by these connections, Transamazonia finds most success triggering this discourse and forging these associations in our mind––a triangulation of the Church, the land, and capital that turns the characters embodying them into overly symbolic and almost hollow figures. Yet Zengel’s eerie performance as a precocious child convinces as she attempts to pass the threshold into adulthood, unearthing her origins before she had to become a preacher’s foil and unwilling earthly proof of the divine.
Transamazonia premiered at the 2024 Locarno International Film Festival.
The post Locarno Review: Transamazonia Hypnotically Finds Healing and Spirituality in the Jungle first appeared on The Film Stage.
