Living in Brazil in a post-Bolsonaro world clearly feels dystopian to director Gabriel Mascaro, who has now made two consecutive films about a near-future where the country’s new rules and regulations take a few cues from a certain Terry Gilliam film with an appropriate title. Divine Love (2019) found an all-encompassing form of state-sponsored evangelical Christianity intermingling with encouragement of polyamorous sexual permissiveness, in the hopes of encouraging more procreation. His new film, The Blue Trail, focuses on how capitalism views the elderly, with anyone over a certain age sent to “the Colony,” a settlement about which nobody really knows anything and from which no one returns. (There’s a minor sort of irony in this film being made under the reign of Brazil’s oldest-ever President, who’d have been sent to the Colony before winning his third term.)
Tereza (Denise Weinberg) is a 77-year old who finds herself thinking about her limited time remaining when the age for Colony eligibility is lowered from 80 to 75, and the signs start adding up. She narrowly dodges being carted off by the police in “the Wrinkle Wagon,” and social workers add laurels to her house in a celebration of her age that also plays like the flipside to the Biblical story about Moses smearing lamb’s blood on the door as a signal to keep away the angel of death. She’s an independent individual who had no plans to retire from her work at an alligator slaughterhouse until she hit 80, but with her unsympathetic daughter assuming custody and not being the type to let her have fun, she decides her ultimate bucket list item is to finally fly in an airplane, and she has to make her way through the Amazon via an illicit boat ride to do it away from prying eyes. It’s The African Queen for contemporary Brazil, but Rodrigo Santoro’s boat captain is more into the psychedelic snail secretions that inspire the title than Bogart’s boozehounding.
Mascaro films tend to be the kind built around a definitive visual, usually sexual: two people having sex on a giant pile of coconuts in August Winds (2014), the sight of an orgy under Christian neon lights in Divine Love, and the titular Neon Bull (2015) in his most successful film to date. Tereza’s age forces him to shift his focus a bit, and the sights here are closer to some of his past work as a documentarian: a giant pile of discarded tires that only exist from the rainforest’s rubber trees being harvested to death, a floating casino on boats, and the odd design of electronic Bibles from a saleswoman who Tereza develops a homoerotic friendship with later on in her journey. The Blue Trail is less than 90 minutes and makes its way through its low-stakes journey fairly quickly, but that’s to its benefit: it’s a short story about a woman’s minor late-in-life epiphanies and finding herself, and it keeps things moving at a sprightly pace that conveys how quickly one has to wrap things up when the end is in sight. The part where Tereza eventually tries the psychedelic snail trail and her eyes turn blue lets Mascaro combine the lights of the floating casino and Memo Guerra’s pulsing electronic score with the sight of two fish. Their fan-like cascading fins and a fondness for locking mouths in a way that resembles both a fight and a kiss surpasses the need for any dialogue, and the film has the good sense to wrap itself up shortly after on a surprisingly melancholy note: Tereza may have found herself, but her days are still rapidly waning and the blue trail will come to an end soon.
Published as part of TIFF 2025 — Dispatch 2.
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