Embrace of the Serpent (El Abrazo de la Serpiente)

**Spoiler Alert**

Director: Ciro Guerra/Starring: Nilbio Torres, Jan Bijvoet, Antonio Bolivar, Brionne Davis and Yauenkü Migue

Colombia's Oscar-nominated submission in the Best Foreign Film category; Embrace of the Serpent (El Abrazo de la Serpiente), was easily one of the best films of 2015 (it arrived too late to make my favorite film list). Based on the diaries of German explorer Theodor Koch-Grunberg, director Ciro Guerra's wondrous black and white film is both ethereally beautiful and at times brutal in its depiction of the insidiousness of white man's contact with South American Amazonian cultures. Koch-Grunberg was an ethnologist dedicated to documenting tribal cultural life but he also zealously pursued what is known as yakruna; a plant sacred to Amazonian tribes. The yakruna plant was said to possess extraordinary healing properties.

Though sympathetic to tribal cultures, Grunberg was also a part of Europe and America's incursions into the Amazon jungles, which included exploitative rubber harvesting and missionaries that preempted local religious customs with coercive Christian conversion.

In Guerra's film, the narrative slides casually from the past; early 20th century to the future--40 years later and back again. Scenes in the past feature Grunberg (Jan Bijvoet), as he seeks the elusive yakruna plant. Joining his search is his assistant Manduca (Yauenku Migue); a tribesman Grunberg rescued from a rubber plantation. In Grunberg's search for yakruna, he meets a potentially hostile tribesman named Karamakate (the younger version played beautifully by Nilbio Torres). Karamakate's wariness of white men is due largely in part to his tribe's decimation at the hands of rubber plantation barons, who force him to live alone and on the run in the forest. Grunberg's first encounter with Karamakate is in a malarial stupor and with Manduca's prompting, the native treats him by blowing a powdery substance up his nose. We never really learn the nature of the substance (powder from coca plants--cocaine?) but it allows Grunberg the physical means to continue on.
The sight of Manduca in slacks and a button down shirt rouses Karamakate to rage; believing Grunberg's companion has sold out to the white man and given up on the tribal way of life. Manduca explains that Grunberg isn't like the other white men who have slaughtered and enslaved the local population in their greedy pursuit of rubber tree resin but his liberator and friend. Together the three men begin their search for the plant though Karamakate is reluctant to allow another white man to exploit the rain-forest's botanical life for personal gain.

Guerra's film articulates well the horrors of the white man's presence in Amazonian South America. As Karamakate, Grunberg and Manduca make their way on rivers, they encounter the death and devastation visited upon the indigenous tribes. Upon arriving at a mission, the three encounter a gun-wielding monk who mistakes them for plantation operatives and nearly shoots them. The mission is populated by converted locals who have become enslaved by Christian dogma. While staying at the mission the three men hear a monk savagely whipping a young child. In an attempt to stop it, the monk is fatally injured; prompting their hasty flight. Another disturbing encounter involves a frightened and nearly hysterical, one-armed native who has escaped the brutal rubber tree barons; his face showing clear signs of mutilation. After he discovers Karamakate has tipped over the resin receptacles around the tree, he frantically replaces them before begging to be shot.

The early Grunberg/Karamakate scenes show a burgeoning friendship; one of mutual trust and occasional jollity. When Grunberg pens a heartfelt letter to his wife, his expression of longing inspires guffaws by Karamakate and Manduca, who find the idea of a man becoming sentimental about a woman comical.
We see Karamakate is puzzled by Grunberg's tendency to carry his unwieldy possessions with him; often imploring him to throw everything away. Grunberg's encumbrances contrast sharply with Karamakate's two possessions; his characteristic necklace and his spear, which doubles as a dart gun.

As the tribal way of life begins to vanish with the white man's protracted presence, Guerra ensures the impact is visceral. When the three men happen upon on a nearly deserted, military outpost, they find the dissolute soldiers are happily incapacitated but Karamakate notices yakruna flowers have been cultivated and used for their hallucinogenic qualities. Furious, he sets fire to the flowers and the tree they encircle.

Forty years in the future, an aging Karamakate (Antonio Bolivar) is sought out by an American explorer named Evan (Brionne Davis), who has used the diary of Koch-Grunberg to conduct his own search for the yakruna plant. We see the elderly, bald Karamakate has retained some memories of his lost tribe's lore as he draws patterns and pictographs on a rock wall. As he draws, he is approached by Evan in a canoe. Evan, like Grunberg before him, asks Karamakate for his help in locating the yakruna plant while holding a copy of the German explorers travel diaries. Looking over his drawing, Karamakate expresses his regret that he cannot remember the significance of most of what he has drawn. With a weary resolve, he agrees to help Evan and like times in the past, the two men embark on a journey that will bring them into contact with the depredations of earlier white visitors, including what looks like crucified, skeletal remains.

Their encounter with another missionary; one who claims to be Jesus Christ, lands them temporarily in a cell. Later, they witness the missionary's megalomaniacal descent into madness as his delusions reach a fever pitch. The scene reminded me of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Kurtz's own power-mad behavior. As the film and the journey near their ends, the last yakruna plant is discovered. Denying Evan the prize he seeks, Karamakate nevertheless allows him to feel its hallucinogenic potency. The visual spectacle it inspires might remind one of the trippy imagery in 2001: A Space Odyssey or Altered States.

It is easy to draw a parallel between the yakruna plant and Karamakate, who are both the last of their kind.

The white man's devastation of the forest and the eradication of tribes and culture provide the film its moral power. Rather than depicting the white man's impact on a village or whole population, he shows us how one man's world (two really, if you count Manduca) becomes nearly obliterated, and in doing so, Karamakate's story serves as the whole.

Guerra's affective use of black and white film gives the story a timeless quality; the present and past dissolve into a deliberate ambiguousness that serves the story well. Guerra's cinematographer David Gallego captures the edenic beauty of the Amazon; the waterways and mountains; showing us a place where nature persists in spite of the white man's intrusive presence.

The film's show stealer is Nilbio Torres, who embodies Karamakate's endangered humanity; a defender of nature who sees the white man's destructive designs as his and the peoples of the Amazon's demise. His hunting skills and his ability to identify the healing attributes of Amazonian plant-life make him the master of his domain where both Grunberg and Evan seem like bumbling infants.

Embrace of the Serpent is a film that leaves you in quiet awe but is so good it leaves you excited enough to want to share it with others. It is beautiful and elegiac; a celebration of man and his intimate connection to nature; a dirge about what has been and could be lost.