“Gloria Bell” meets “Children of Men” is an odd elevator pitch for any movie, but Gabriel Mascaro’s latest mind-bending trip out of Brazil might fit the bill.
Congratulations, the 77-year-old Tereza (Denise Weinberg) is told. She’s just received a medal commemorating her latest shift into older age as a living reminder of national heritage. That means, of course, she’s now been phased out of her role as a factory lackey in dystopian near-future Brazil due to her age. Congratulations, you can now “enjoy” your life, a paper pusher tells her as she’s forced by the government out of her home and into a senior living colony, a place we can tell is a prison of nothingness where one waits to die. Not so fast.
Tereza’s next act — her third, really, if you count whatever her life started as, and then whatever it became that forced her into a fascist workforce to begin with, all offscreen — is the subject of Brazilian writer/director Mascaro’s terrific Berlin Silver Bear winner “The Blue Trail.” This beautifully shot film is co-written by Tibério Azul. With mere days left before her forced relocation, Tereza escapes her settlement to embark on a journey of self-seeking through the Amazon, and her story is told with rich texture and feeling that transcend what could have been simply a “timely” narrative. Unfortunately, in this movie, the government has prioritized youth to maximize productivity, so anyone of an older class is effectively out.
“The Blue Trail” is one of those near-future-set movies with trappings recognizable to our own present, where the dystopian technology is only a slight update to our own. The porta-potties have a just-so different color. There’s a satellite placed here or there around otherwise underdeveloped surroundings. Told with the economy in the same number of minutes as the years this character has been alive, Mascaro’s short, sharp wonder of a fourth feature after films including “Neon Bull” and “Divine Love” is an enormously moving exploration of the last chapter in a woman’s life. A woman who wants nothing to do with the daughter who’s been assigned to take care of her and send her off into parts unknown. An older woman whose only dream is only, at last, to fly in an airplane
Mascaro’s wry and witty new film will remind savvy audiences of bleak apocalyptic films about humanity’s potential loss of feeling against technologies that crush them, like “Children of Men” and “The Beast,” where the small perturbations that amount to dystopia register in things like satellites affixed to nearby huts, or plumes of red smoke bursting into the sky above an otherwise tranquil Amazonian journey. What helps make this “Blue Trail” soar beyond its roots are Guillermo Garza’s vivid, Academy-ratio cinematography and Memo Guerra’s hauntingly wounded woodwind score. Basically, you can’t tell the difference between our now and this movie’s present.
Tereza, desperate to shirk a government order that’s all about maintaining national productivity above all else, escapes the process that would shuttle her into a retirement colony. She ends up on the boat of someone who has no idea what he’s doing but is captaining the vessel nonetheless. He’s also extremely handsome and allured by the blue fluid leaked from a snail that can potentially tell the future. You crave more information about some of these side characters, but the pull of Mascaro’s filmmaking brings you back to his protagonist.
As Tereza, Denise Weinberg’s astonishingly lived-in and deeply felt performance reveals a woman with demons that are far behind her but also closer to the present than she may realize. She wants to ride a plane for the first time, but keeps encountering characters who promise to enable that, but then end up as red herrings in and of themselves. Mascaro’s film is keen on zooming in on the sexual tension between Tereza and said captain, said pilot, as her road odyssey leads her further into a journey of self-discovery. Part of this journey, she keeps telling these people, is about “securing her place in heaven.” Meanwhile, the man captaining the boat that gets her into the Amazon is possessed by thoughts of a lost love, a story even a head-in-her-hands Tereza is exhausted by.
It doesn’t help that Tereza’s daughter has consumed the proverbial Kool-Aid of whatever this dystopian Brazil is. After some botched escape efforts, Tereza is forcibly brought back into this dystopian government’s confines, but she has a weird plan that will work: She feigns incontinence while being forced to wear diapers ahead of a decampment to senior living suicide. Tereza will do nothing to stop herself from flying on a plane. Or getting out of all this. She wants more from life, her joie de vivre still intact.
Weinberg is an ideal match to this material, her hair down, long and grey, and her feelings overflowingly open to whoever encounters her. Especially young men who purport to have an idea of who she is. One of the most grimly funniest moments of the movie sees Tereza interrogate the boat driver about that wedding ring on his finger. He looks at it like he’s never seen it before, and all but throws it off his finger and the boat. Then, he gets high out of his mind on a blue drug secreted by a snail.
Brazil has had an enormous resurgence in North America the last few years due to multi-Oscar-nominated movies like “I’m Still Here” and “The Secret Agent.” (It’s also worth noting that this film’s casting director Gabriel Domingues also chose the ensemble behind “The Secret Agent.”) “The Blue Trail” belongs in those films’ annals as a work that has something more global to say: A 77-year-old woman’s story is just as worthy of telling as anyone else’s. And while the dystopian backdrop gives it more contemporary resonance, it’s the now, the urgency, of Weinberg’s performance, that allows “The Blue Trail” to successfully find its own footing.
“The Blue Trail” opens in select theaters starting April 3 from Dekanalog.
Grade: B+
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