The Blue Trail

Bluesky

It's not often that a Dystopian setting is used as the backdrop for a warm-hearted quasi-adventure story of self-fulfillment but ever since his debut Neon Bull, Gabriel Mascaro has shown a knack for combining unusual ideas and moods. He also took us into the near-future with his previous film Divine Love, which satirised religious views of marriage and child rearing. Now it’s old age he’s got his sights on and, secondarily, the environment - suggesting that while things may not always look as pristine as they once did, where there’s life, there’s hope.

There’s no indication of exactly what year we’re in this time but it surely isn’t very far from now. “The future is for everyone,” declares the banner that flies from the back of a plane making daily forays over the house where 77-year-old Tereza (Denise Weinberg) lives. The government has recently sent someone to her home to make sure she's celebrated too - adding a set of laurel leaves over her door and declaring her “national living heritage”.

The only problem is they don't actually plan for her to live there much longer. They've just lowered the age at which the elderly are sent to live in “the colony”, whether they like it or not - a place that's craftily never shown and from which there are suggestions that nobody ever returns. Perhaps it really exists as a restful retirement village - but a piece of graffiti demanding, “Give me back my grandpa” doesn't make it sound too hopeful.

Tereza’s daughter Joana (Clarissa Pinheiro) has also just been given custody of her so that all purchases must get the younger woman’s okay and the chances of avoiding the colony seem minimal, since IDs are checked at almost every turn. Happy with her lot and the job she's just been forced to quit, Tereza decides it's time to fulfil a bucket list wish to fly before she's shipped off. That proves easier said than done with Joana holding the purse strings, so Tereza hitches a lift on a riverboat to rival The African Queen with a captain, Cadu (Rodrigo Santoro), whose business may not be entirely legit.

This is just the start of the engagingly meandering trail that Mascaro (and his co-writer Tibério Azul) takes with Tereza. Some of it is rooted in the natural environment - and the way Guillermo Garza’s camera gracefully glides over a sun-kissed Amazonian waterway is just one of The Blue Trail’s many treats - while other moments take us to the sort of trippy realms that the director has always dabbled in down the years. These come courtesy of the “blue drool snail”, a creature with slime the colour of royal blue ink, which, Cadu explains and demonstrates, can be used as eye drops to see into your own future.

The real magic lies in the determination of Tereza, a woman who is perfectly capable of looking after herself and remaining responsible for her own future. There may be a river running through this rather than a road but this is a camino, during which Tereza will also encounter a man (Adanilo), whose ultralight plane is grounded by an ultra-heavy gambling habit and fellow senior Roberta (Miriam Socarras), who runs a travelling bible sales outfit from her own boat.

When you get old, hope you find someone who looks at you the way Mascaro looks at Tereza and Roberta. He isn’t scared to get close enough for us to see their wrinkles for the admirable accomplishments of lives well lived that they are. His camera invites us to see the beauty of their contours even if they don’t look quite as they used to, just as we can still see the beauty of the banks of the river even when it is covered with an apocalyptic amount of tyres that have been dumped there. His film also puts the grim political situation in its place - it’s an unpleasant reality but one that he refuses to let beat his lead character into submission. Through it all, the playful score from Memo Guerra skips along, bringing humour to some scenes, mechanisation to others and lyricism elsewhere.

In Roberta, Tereza finds a fellow free spirit - and a few ideas as to how she might continue to dodge the ‘wrinkle wagon’ that is used to cart off the elderly. She doesn’t need a plane to help her spirit soar - and perhaps it’s never too late for a bit of beginner’s luck.