Law Journal Reviews Blue Trail and Birthday Trip
The Blue Trail explores themes of age and class through a distinct cinematic lens. Gabriel Mascaro’s film presents a Brazilian dystopia where the government relocates the elderly to an island.
A forced retirement on the Amazon
The world barely changed in Gabriel Mascaro’s The Blue Trail. It’s the very recent future, and the Brazilian government has a program of relocating every person who turns 80 to an island where they can live their twilight years in peace without putting a strain on the rest of the society, and freeing time and space for the younger generation. Forced retirement, for people who cannot afford to retire and mitigating unemployment rates. Teresa (Denise Weinberg) is 77 and lives alone on the outskirts of the jungle where the Amazon River serpents through. She works in a local slaughterhouse for the processing of crocodile meat, a safe, uneventful routine organises her day.
But Denise is told the threshold to go to the old people’s island has moved to 75, and now two years overdue, she’s ordered to present herself for relocation. She’s not ready. She may be old, but there’s a lot left for her to do before she bows out, and she decides on one innocuous thing: to fly on an aeroplane. But what for her is just a recreational trip, the rest of society sees as an attempt to flee, and, as, at that age, she’s given to the care of her daughter, she’s refused a ticket from a local travel agency for a same-day return flight.
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So starts the odyssey of Teresa along the Amazon, trying to reach another river town where someone has a plane she can hopefully rent for her joyride before she’s finally caught by the government, shipped to an island to die. For Teresa, it’s not just a trip for a taste of freedom; it’s a way of making a stand for her human dignity. Old people caught by the government are transported in these small, rickety caged vans, said to be for their protection. A benevolent oppression is still oppression, and Mascaro recognises that when fascism comes again, it’ll come in the guise of the greater good, like altruism of centrism. “There’s no more wanting, these days”, says someone to Teresa at some point, resigning themselves to a reality they deem necessary.
But not for Teresa. She catches a ride with a lonely, forlorn ferryman (Rodrigo Santoro), who teaches her the wonders of a mysterious Amazonian snail that secretes a psychotropic blue goo that people use to see an inner truth. Later in her trip, she accepts a lift with Roberta (Miriam Soncarras), a Cuban octogenarian who sells modern digital Bibles from her boat. She avoided the island by paying the government for a certificate that exempts her from forced retirement, and recruits Teresa to help her on her journey. Unsurprisingly, the rules are not for those who can afford it.
Protests in the jungle
Mascaro films the Amazon like it’s home for Teresa. Where others saw an unforgiving nature that tolerates some humans, Mascaro wants us to understand that in that place, where nature wins the fight against civilisation, Teresa can find her satisfying sense of freedom. The raindrops are heavy and loud, the sun scorching and sweaty. Humans live in a state of almost constant alertness against a system that can take them away from their place. No one is to be trusted, even if Teresa pays them for help. It feels like a society broken apart, where the things that make us human are lost or left out to rust like the cabins near the river.
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But it’s in this place that Mascaro gives Teresa her deserved happiness. Naked and ecstatic, gambling under the influence of hallucinogenic. It’s like the world envisioned by a William S. Burroughs finding himself, but here unconstrained by the point of view of a white American fetishising the jungle. It’s genuine and human.
Complementing Mascaro is Weinberg’s perfect performance. Her resilience against a law she feels is unfair is the type of stand that could start revolutions. There’s a scene where she eventually finds herself in one of those “wrinkle-wagons”, and her slouched, angry expression says more than what a monologue could. It’s fitting she finds Soncarras to fill in her gap. The two exude so much joi de vivre in a chemical reaction that settles the film through its last third.
The Blue Trail is a very Brazilian film. In this, I mean it’s moved by a narrative idea that is unique to South America. It’s closer to the films of Glauber Rocha than some of the modern filmmakers out there. It would pair well with this year’s Australian film Wolfram, as both offer a new post-colonial perspective surrounded by nature. The outback in Warwick Thornton’s film, and the jungle in Mascaro’s. And both wish for their people to find peace in their environment.
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For anyone once found an urge to break the rules.
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