Embrace of the Serpent (2015)
I have never been to the rainforest. I have not lived in the forest, looking only to nature for sustenance, meaning and preservation. I am an Indian. A south Indian. A boy from a village near Visakhapatnam, brought up near fields and farming. I have seen traps set to prevent wild boar from trashing our field, something I don’t tell a lot of my friends. But nothing more than that. I grew up in a town, went to a catholic school, and live in a metro now.
At numerous occasions during my life, I’ve questioned the impact of the British on my country. From various angles. I kept coming back to one question. How did the society of that time respond to the first incursion of the whites? How do two aliens interact with each other for the first time? How do two vastly divergent branches of civilisation respond to each other when they share almost nothing in common?
I still don’t know the answer to this question. I might never fully appreciate the answer. But more than anything I’ve seen or read, this movie brought me a lot closer to the answer. This film showed me how things are forgotten, modified, corrupted or abandoned when colonialism runs its course. Embrace of the Serpent is a Colombian film. Directed by Ciro Guerra. I wasn’t being pretentious when I decided to watch this movie. I thought it would be another adventure/thriller like Apocalypto. It turned out to be so much more. In the shoes of those eternal classics like Fitzcarraldo, Aguirre, The Mission, comes a titan that stands above all of them.
It’s a simple film to describe. Two timelines, playing off each other, feeding off each other’s energy, describe two similar stories. A white man is helped by a native through the Amazonian rainforest in search ofsomething precious. Imperialism, colonialism, religion, faith, belief and science are all players, cooperating to form a slow rot deep in the center of the societies inhabiting the rainforest. But the movie does something I have not felt in a long time. It seeps through your core as you watch it, the characters’ fears become yours, you find yourself unable to do anything but sit and be swept along with the gently paddling rowboats as they ferry our heroes onwards.
Karamakate is our hero. Karamakate is the impossibly loveable and human character, the tribal shaman who guides us through this psychedelic adventure. He is the reluctant tour guide who takes the white men through the river, once as a young man, once as an older, wiser one, on a journey he himself can not remember or understand too clearly. Caapi, chullachaqui, ayahuasca, hapé, mambé; all these tribal, arboricentric, psychedelic references form the arches of the film’s structure, holding it up, symbolising the deep love and respect that the filmmakers hold for the intimate knowledge held by the indigenous traditions of the Amazon.
But all this eminently laudable drama and beauty takes second fiddle to the existential questions this film poses and attempts to answer about colonialism. This isn’t to say that the movie takes the all too familiar whites bad, natives good approach. Its masterful portrayal of the inadvertent negatives of forced clash of cultures are what elevates this from a good to a great piece of filmmaking. Neither of the whites we spend a significant amount of time with in the movie are racist or condescending. They just want to find out more about the yakruna. But everywhere they go, the influence of the whites is inescapable. It pervades the forest. Nothing shall ever be the same again.
I see this discussion way too often on the internet.
“The English colonial rule was harmful to India.”
“We wouldn’t have had the concept of India, the railways or the systems of democracy if they hadn’t been here.”
“Maybe we wouldn’t have needed them if they hadn’t come.”
What’s the point of hypotheticals? They were here. They did what they did. We take the positives and move on. At what cost? When does the cloud get dark enough for it to be futile to look for the silver lining?
A vignette in the film deals with this quite admirably. Theodor, one of the two explorers, is an admired guest at a tribe along the riverbank, to whom he shows the wonders of the compass. While he’s leaving the tribe, he sees that his compass has been taken by the village headman. He starts fighting, inspite of entreaties by his companions, yelling, “I can’t leave a compass here. They navigate using the knowledge the winds and the positions of the stars. I can’t let that knowledge be lost to the world by leaving a compass with them.” Karamakate replies, “You cannot forbid them to learn. Knowledge belongs to all men. But you can’t understand that because you’re nothing but a white.”
Would the nation have been the same if the whites hadn’t come here? No, it wouldn’t have. Would the nation have been vastly different if the whites had behaved differently when they had come here? I don’t know. Could the world have done with a lot more kindness and understanding and love when two unknown tribes meet each other for the first time? Yes. But it rarely happens that way. Everyone wants whats best for their tribe and family. Even Theodor. Even gentle Evan. Even the conflicted Karamakate. And that’s what renders the clash of civilisation and ideals unavoidable.
Embrace of the serpent is a serene, beautiful movie with stunning cinematography, shot in resplendent black and white. But the themes it deals with are deeper and more conflicted than the most furious rapids on the Amazon. Or the Ganges. Or everywhere the foot of a conqueror has stepped, intent on enlightening the lives of the savages that lived there.
PS: Wear a mask. Please.