The most emotionally and spiritually invigorating faith-based films rely not on proselytization or condemnation, but on abstraction. Their dramatic force comes from their characters’ tormented search for meaning in a sea (or forest) of contradictory meaning and meaninglessness; clear-eyed realization (or rejection) of faith minus this emotional and spiritual struggle is akin to achieving enlightenment without introspection. Where’s catharsis (or despair) in that?
Pia Marais’ Transamazonia is, at least narratively, positioned to be all about that. Like Martin Scorsese’s Silence (2016), a film about two 17th-century Jesuit priests who travel from Portugal to Edo-period Japan to locate their mentor and spread Catholic Christianity, Marais’ film is also about two outsiders trying to spread the influence of their God in a place where they don’t belong. Here, we have a father and daughter, Lawrence (Jeremy Xido) and Rebecca (Helena Zengel), who stumble into the business of evangelism after miraculously surviving a crash-landing into the Amazon forest. Rebecca, in particular, is recognized as a “miracle” survivor and healer, which helps her father sustain a good-faith relationship with the Indigenous people.
However, the growing presence of illegal loggers threatening to invade the Amazonian wood and land pushes the evangelists into the center of escalating conflict between them and the Indigenous people. Which side will the father and daughter take? Are they going to expose themselves as yet another set of colonialist settlers who, as one of the loggers says, “just want [the Indigenous peoples’] souls?” Or are they going to fight for the Indigenous people? Or — better still — will this external conflict crack open the fissures in their seemingly perfect relationship, making one of them take the colonizer’s side and the other the Indigenous peoples’?
15 minutes into this 113-minute film, we have all the answers. Because unlike Silence (or other anti-colonialist but not faith-based narratives like Lucrecia Martel’s Zama or Claire Denis’ White Material), Marais’ film is not interested in journeying into the heart of darkness with its characters: it is content on simply exposing it. So, the moment we see the first Indigenous character in the film, we know he’s nothing more than a saintly figure responsible for saving kid Rebecca from the wreckage of the plane crash. The next moment — when we see Xido’s long-haired, slightly crazed, messianic-looking father figure unsure about accepting the hospitalized Rebecca as his biological daughter — we know that he’s one of our antagonists.
These are, of course, just setups; the film can still complicate them through, for instance, rich characterizations or contrapuntal editing. But Marais never commits to developing the father-daughter relationship that ought to be the film’s emotional heart — Rebecca, in the hands of Zengel, always seems overly suspicious of her father’s evangelism; their relationship, from the get-go, seems corrupted. It doesn’t help that the director utilizes associative editing to underline this point further. The most memorable cut — both for its technical proficiency and lack of subtlety — equates Rebecca and Lawrence’s forceful “healing” of one of their followers inside their unnaturally lit, fluorescent navy-blue healing home with the sawing off of a tree in the Amazon forest.
The statement that settler colonialism robs Indigenous people of the tangible and intangible is loud and clear, and correct. This also explains why major film festivals like Locarno and New York have opened their doors to Transamazonia: clearly formulated ideas executed competently enough is a perfect recipe for a festival favorite. But where’s the drama? Where’s the emotional and spiritual struggle that gives weight to the point that Transamazonia makes loudly, clearly, and correctly?
Published as part of Locarno Film Festival 2024 — Dispatch 2.
