by Harry Varvaressos
Worth: $9.50
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Denise Weinberg, Rodrigo Santoro, Miriam Socarras
Intro:
… initially inviting, rather pleasant as you sink into place, and yet increasingly – unmistakably – fetid.
Evidently, Gabriel Mascaro is interested in rivers.
The American poster of his soft-dystopian travelogue The Blue Trail depicts its titular waterway – the Amazon – in electric blue against a white background, starkly illuminating the river’s path as it snakes elegantly into an endless horizon.
Rivers are, of course, rich with connotations. They are givers of life and regulators of nature. They mark boundaries and thresholds. And then there’s their resemblance to time, to the inevitability of fate: a perennial flow which courteously drifts us towards our mortal undoing.
In the poster’s foreground, Denise Weinberg’s septuagenarian protagonist Tereza walks along this ‘trail’, her decisive stride marrying the terrestrial defiance of the pilgrimage with the graceful surrender of buoyant adventure. The spiritual quest she has undertaken requires her cunning, her courage, her determination. And yet, at the end of this trail, she will inevitably submit to her mortality.
In a premise that reads like The Ballad of Narayama meets Logan’s Run, Tereza is made redundant from her alligator-abattoir (!) job and informed that she must relocate to a “colony” for those over the age of 75. She goes on the run, and outlandish adventures ensue. Among them is a jaunt with an unscrupulous sailor (Rodrigo Santoro) involving a psychedelic snail, a doomed liaison with a gambling addict hired to restore a rudimentary plane, an açai bowl enjoyed in the ruins of a disquieting theme park, and a daring escape from a quasi-detention centre in a portaloo.
These peculiar scenarios all capture a degree of interest but don’t seem to have much relation to each other, whether in greater thematic significance or mere plot mechanics. For what is essentially a chase movie in setup, there is almost a complete lack of tension; Tereza repeatedly enters dangerous situations only to escape with relative ease. Weinberg’s stoic countenance doesn’t help much either, giving us scant insight into how these presumably stressful situations actually feel.
We could forgive Mascaro for being circuitous, even meandering, in chronicling this journey. Spiritual quests tend not to be frenzied affairs, and may be reasonably expected to take a wrong turn or two. But, whether you’re trudging towards Damascus or sailing into a heart of darkness, these paths are decidedly directional. By the end of his (curiously concise) odyssey, not only has Mascaro failed to convince us that we’ve ended up any the wiser, but – by creating a panoply of diverting vignettes – he has repeatedly teased us that revelation is just around the next bend.
Only exacerbating this cumulative frustration is Mascaro’s third act turn. Tereza veers into transgression with fairly inscrutable motives, threatening to alienate us entirely from a character that’s already proven difficult to get along with. And yet, in fealty to the film’s pattern of inconsistency thus far, the section’s repellence manages to match its appeal for one reason: Miriam Socarras. The Cuban luminary brings tremendous vitality to the piece as a canny vendor who spruiks digital bibles to riverside favelas, and the friendship she forms with elder-in-arms Tereza is warm and affectionate enough to induce an overdue smile from our steely-eyed heroine. Witnessing their self-determination as kindred women in a cruel and impoverished dystopia is genuinely uplifting, and sees Mascaro’s portrait of ageless brio most persuasively crystallise.
Alas, when all’s said and done, Mascaro’s river of ideas ends up feeling more like an overcrowded spa: initially inviting, rather pleasant as you sink into place, and yet increasingly – unmistakably – fetid.
