Smite Material: Marais Unearths Jungle Cliches
It’s been over a decade since South African director Pia Marais’ last feature, and she’s spent six years working on her latest, the ambitious but ultimately lackluster Transamazonia. There’s gleaming evidence of something brilliant hinted at within substantial themes concerning religious zealotry, deforestation and familial bonds as major contributions to an eroding, toxic force which coalesce, despite good and bad intentions, into a lethal equation for all parties. But strangely oblique character development and a myriad of narrative cliches undermine the possibilities of reaching beyond the obvious, leading to a sanitized, even romanticized version of what feels like rosy-tinted post-colonialist semantics.… Read the rest
