Review of The Blue Trail – A hypnotic tale of elder rebellion in the Amazon in a chilling dystopian tale | film

gApril Mascaro’s intriguing, wayward film is a kind of road movie, or perhaps river movie—the Amazon, in fact, set in Brazil’s remote northwest. It’s a film that walks by the nose, wanders across land and water, and is beautifully shot with gorgeous visual compositions. There are sometimes uncanny similarities between Fitzcarraldo or The African Queen, but the cinematic allusions are not the point. This is a drama that seeks to transform and liberate its aging heroine through a series of encounters and vignettes; It’s a film about escape and the film itself probably escapes general classification, though leaving the disparate ideas and characters undeveloped is a problem.

On one level, we have a frightening dystopian nightmare about a future society that pretends to value its older citizens by forcing them to leave their homes and live in special “colonies,” a low-cost, gerontological warehouse for everyone over the age of 75. They are sometimes transported in a special prison vehicle for straying elderly people called a “wrinkle wagon” – like a dog walker’s truck – and when they finally have to take a bus that takes them to those places. “Colonies” are issued mandatory and humiliating adult diapers. But on another level, it’s a more realistic drama about the way society patronizes and erases the elderly.

Teresa is a 77-year-old widow, played by Denise Weinberg with a vague expression of bewildered disapproval that occasionally breaks into an amused smile; She works at a caiman skinning factory and her adult daughter doesn’t care much for her. One day, she was rudely told that she should leave the humble cottage where she was perfectly happy and go to one of these colonies. But by faking a toilet accident using her adult diaper, she boldly escapes being taken to the coach.

A riverboat captain named Cado (Rodrigo Santoro) takes a grey-haired fugitive part of the way along the Amazon River to where Ludimir (Adanello), the pilot of a small plane, makes a promise of a voyage somewhere, anywhere. But her real savior turns out to be Roberta (Miriam Socarras), a woman about Teresa’s age who drives a rickety riverboat and sells digital Bibles, despite having no interest or belief in God. She and Teresa became friends, co-conspirators, and perhaps lovers.

And everywhere they go, Teresa finds the strange “blue slobber snail,” whose watery protrusions cause ecstatic visions if you put drops in your eyes. Introduced to this by the half-crazy Cado, Santoro may surprise those who remember him as the smoothly attractive man in love in reality. In fact, I regretted his early exit from this film.

The Blue Trail is a general mixture: partly it has the bittersweet tone of many films about defiant seniors, and partly something more subversive and unsettling. The combination of tones is interesting, like chewing cake and cheese at the same time.