Embrace of the Serpent
El abrazo de la serpiente

Ciro Guerra’s Embrace of the Serpent is a contemplative, spiritual journey down a jungle river and into the infinite. Like Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the film explores the effect of colonialism on indigenous cultures, and the intellectual and philosophical differences between “enlightened Westerners” and those they call “savages,” or “pagans.” But while this film is inspired by the journals of two white explorers who visited the Colombian Amazon in the 1900s and 1940’s, its narrative is told less from the visitors’ perspective and more through an insider’s attempt to understand those who intrude into the jungle and disturb the simple, delicate, and timeless rules of its ecosystem. The bifurcated narrative follows an Amazonian shaman called Karamakate (played by Nilbio Torres as a young man and Antonio Bolivar Salvado Yangiama as an older man). Known as the World Mover, Karamakate is the last survivor of his tribe. He travels up the river at two different points in his life, each time with a Western scientist looking for a rare and sacred hallucinogenic plant. The first man he accompanies is a German ethnographer, Theodor Koch-Grunberg (Borgman star Jan Bijvoet) in the early 20th century. The second is an American, Richard Evans Schultes (Brionne Davis), who, thirty years later, wants to follow up on Koch-Grunberg’s work.

The picture deftly and unpretentiously explores the devastating results of colonial assaults on native cultures and how the Western interlopers invariably pervert their own beliefs in ways well beyond whatever misguided intentions they started out with. There are two standout set pieces that revolve around Christian missions gone awry, which drive these themes home.  But like Francis Ford Coppola’s Heart of Darkness adaptation Apocalypse Now (1979), this is a film that aims for epic, hypnotic, and transcendent, but ends up feeling somewhat uneven, meandering, and overlong—with a few sequences that are so unforgettable they overshadow the film as a whole. The widescreen, black and white, 35mm cinematography, which should lend the picture an air of period authenticity, ends up distancing the viewer from the journey rather than making us an active participant.  The film is beautiful, to be sure, but the images just look too clean and digital processed to feel authentically of the time this story takes place. I often found myself thinking about the sensation of watching Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo (1982) and Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972)—both of which make you feel like you’re actually in the jungle with the characters, not looking at a jungle through a cinematographer’s lens.