Forget Apocalypse Now. Toss aside Conrad’s venerated Heart of Darkness. When it comes to obtaining a vivid realization of the essence of Amazonian culture, check out Ciro Guerra’s amazing Embrace of the Serpent. The stunningly shot black-and-white Colombian Oscar nominee frames two separate interactions, 40 years apart, between a pair of white explorers and an Amazonian shaman. The shaman, Karmamakate the World Mover, is simply one of the most memorable film characters in recent years.
Both actors who portray Karmakate are riveting. In the early 1900s, an ill German scientist, Theo, approaches Karmakate (Nilbio Torrres) seeking the sacred, mysterious drug yakruna. Decades later, another white man, Evan, an American, wishes to follow in the footsteps of Theo. The last survivor of his Cohiuano tribe, Karmakate (Antonio Bolivar) is no longer the vibrant young force he was previously. but a weakened shell of his former self. In many ways, Embrace of the Serpent will trace his remarkable evolution during the second trip, tracing a growing willingness to help in his approach to Evan.
The film intertwines two seperate river voyages taken by the men. In the first Karmakate is clearly in charge. For example, he forbids the sick man to eat certain foods out of a respect for the universe. By the second journey, Karmakate is at first a broken man struggling to remember his former powers.
Throughout, Karmakate possesses a vitality to be reckoned with. On several occasions he bemoans the white man’s attachment to all his “things,” which he says make him crazy. He encourages Theo to toss his bulky cases into the river. Theo protests since they contain valuable diaries and drawings, which he declares will give his fellow scientists knowledge of Karmakate’s people and their beliefs.
Later, when visiting a tribe, Theo has his compass stolen. Upset, he frets to Karmakate that it was his concern the tribe’s natural navigation instincts would be compromised if they possessed such a device. Here the same Karmakate who decried the white man’s “things” takes a different tack. He waves off Theo to let it be. Depriving the tribespeople of the knowledge provided by a compass wouldn’t be fair, he asserts.
What gives? Is an advocate of upholding tradition to the point of claiming that dreams provide a fuller guidance for man than science, suddenly reconsidering? The film’s skillful nuances provide a deeper complexity to the tensions between the two men. When a starving Theo, still in frail health from malaria, spears a fish and ravishes it raw in defiance of Karmikate’s edict, our sympathies are with him. His logic that his efforts to spread the word regarding this nearly lost society’s insights should be important to Karmakate also seems justified.
Yet make no mistake. Embrace of the Serpent’s greatest strengths are displayed when it contrasts the innocence of the native culture with the predatory nature of the outsiders. In parallel scenes in both journeys, the travelers encounter a Christian missionary who flogs the young children under his care. In the latter, the degradation of invasive Western ideas grows even worse. Unlike the unwavering vision of Karmakate, the mutation of Christian doctrines presents itself in full force. A messiah figure who wears a crown of thorns, seems right out of Ken Russell’s The Devils. I won’t spoil where he is headed, but it’s enough of a shock to have Karmakate and Evan bolt out of his compound in the middle of the night.
There is an enormous amount of food for thought in Embrace of the Serpent. Karmikate’s mistrustfulness of the white man is nicely offset by his parallel compassion. His Cohiuano tribe is a fabrication (as is yakurna) yet the universality of this film’s vision cannot be denied.
Embrace of the Serpent takes a jolting turn when it embraces trippy scenes straight out of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Yet it does not pretend to be a wild-eyed Fitzcarraldo, Werner Herzog’s 1982 odyssey depicting a mad Westerner’s attempts to bring an opera house to the jungles of South America. It does pose a pivotal question: are Western outsiders prisoners to a linear way of thinking in their ethnocentric dismissal of cultures like the Amazonian one depicted here? What is mankind losing
as a result? One look at Karmakate and it should be clearly apparent.
Mind-Altering Film In Pursuit of A Mind-Altering Drug….4.5 (out of 5) stars