Film review: Two worlds collide in Brazil's meditative and mysterious The Fever
An Indigenous man works the ports of big-city Manaus, but the jungle calls to him
The CInematheque streams The Fever until April 1
BRAZILIAN WRITER-DIRECTOR Maya Da-Rin’s entrancing new feature The Fever opens with a man in a safety vest and hard hat, standing in front of a shipping container. He’s surrounded by a thick chorus of crickets, frogs, and birdsong. But then the sounds are gone, and the auditory hallucination gives way to the empty roar of cranes on the industrial dock where he works.
Justino (Regis Myrupu) is a middle-aged Indigenous man who travels between two worlds: his village home on the edge of the jungle, where he sleeps in a hammock and harvests bananas, and the pulsing Amazonas capital of Manaus, where he works as a security guard at its busy ports.
A widower who’s bored by his monotonous job and faced with the departure of his daughter for medical school, he finds himself afflicted by a strange fever. The illness arises from some unspoken condition—at one point he tells his daughter it’s not something he can explain to her in a way she will understand. But we can see it’s about loss and disorientation: unlike his children, who embrace a new world and education, he’s been caught in the need to labour in the city, ever called by the magic of the jungle where he grew up in the Desana tribe.
And so Da-Rin’s subtle, sensorial film speaks empathetically to Indigenous people across the globe. Aching with quiet yearning, it gets under your skin.
Da-Rin has a background as a visual artist, a fact that’s strikingly evident here. Framing every shot with an assured eye, she plays with the liminal space that Justino inhabits. Wide shots show the dark tangle of misty jungle that borders the fluorescent glare of city lights. When Justino gets off the bus at night, his eyes linger on the dense Amazonian brush on the side of the four-lane highway. Da-Rin has a way of making the dark a living force.
The film is slow, elliptical, and meditative, never fully divulging its secrets. The mystical surrounds Justino and his family, whether it’s the old stories he tells his grandchildren, the meaning he ascribes his dreams, or in the way his brother explains the strange attacks by an unknown animal on local livestock. That magic is undercut by harsh details from the real world: the open racism of Justino’s coworkers, or the brutal fact that Justino lives in a country where he has to wear a bullet-proof vest and carry a gun at his job.
Though never overtly political, Da-Rin’s film speaks searingly to Brazil today. Consider the right-wing government’s war against the Amazon forest and its people. The fact that Manaus has now become a centre for the out-of-control spread of COVID-19, with the Amazon’s Indigenous people fearing a surge (a fact Da-Rin couldn’t have predicted when she made the film), makes The Fever even more heartbreaking.
A running motif is the giant crack in the cement wall around Justino’s handbuilt house—and the film makes it feel like there is some larger fracture in the universe.
The Fever works a dreamlike spell, and by the end, its Indigenous mysticism will make far more rational sense to you than the chaos of so-called "progress".
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