Recensioni de* critic*

The film is strange enough to resist the worst of the old clichés, which is to say it resists moral certainty... It is a glorious excursion, full of beauty and wonder, but it leaves its viewers more unsettled than before.

What Ciro Guerra has thus accomplished with Embrace of the Serpent is not only a creative re-contextualization that redresses the shameful practices of a national history, but also a mode of storytelling that communicates in compelling, humanistic terms. As a result, Embrace of the Serpent has reached an international audience moved by the film's respectful and relevant portrait of a world heedlessly forsaken.

Pivoting away from a Herzog-style view of this wild space as a merciless and chaotic proving ground for dreamers and maniacs, Guerra instead approaches it from a native perspective. Embrace of the Serpent thus yields a much richer portrait of the region than perhaps any before, infusing a fresh perspective and rich imagistic style into its slippery depiction of Heraclitean unity and flux.

The movie shows in grisly detail the wreckage left by the 20th-century rubber trade. A sudden lurch into trippy abstraction at the end simply doesn't work, but for the vast majority of the time this is a strong and original film.

The mystical allure of Ciro Guerra's adventure-in-the-Amazon drama Embrace of the Serpent is so potent that it might take you a while to realize you're watching an anti-colonialist parable. Maybe that's the key to a good allegory: You feel the ideas seeping into your skin rather than conking you on the head.

While Embrace of the Serpent—Ciro Guerra's third, incantatory feature film—took the top Directors' Fortnight prize at Cannes and, among other honors, is the first Colombian film to be nominated for an Oscar, these superlatives are perhaps less intriguing than its upending of the familiar heart-of-darkness jungle narrative. Like a potion, or better yet, like a blast of medicinal "sun's semen" from a shaman's snuff pipe, the visionary mode of Amazonian storytelling is here at the helm.

The film's power emerges not just through the story, cowritten with Jacques Toulemonde Vidal, but in Guerra's mystical approach, which plays with chronology in order to stay true to the film's subjectivity. Embrace of the Serpent subverts time and space while mostly staying grounded in the primordial world of the Amazon jungle.

It is intelligent and sensitive and assembled with a great care, and worth watching just for its images of the jungle, which is often seen from the points-of-view of a canoe gliding across misty water, or a party of explorers moving through thickets of gnarled trees and shrubs. But it seems averse to letting a mysterious image or poetic moment linger onscreen, and in the mind, without instantly using it as a springboard to talk about the conflict between whites and the natives they're exploiting

Herein lies the paradox: Guerra's excesses in arthouse symmetry tend to arrive in the service of a just and angry correctivism. So for all the praise greeting Embrace of the Serpent's tremendous accomplishment, one can only hope its success allows for finer-grained indigenous narratives to reach the big screen, rather than being taken as a cure-all unto itself.

If Serpent is not quite weird enough to make for a fully transporting vision quest, its dual narrative nonetheless gives the film an impressively bleak fullness-of-time grandeur as an indictment of colonialism.

Is it possible for a movie to be too perfect a dialectic, or too smart for its own good? ...Shrewd at tweaking the clichés of colonial fantasy, Embrace Of The Serpent is ultimately an academic exercise, full of stand-ins and signifiers—a kind of Velvet Goldmine for the destructive impact of the South American rubber trade, minus the sense of decadent fun.

The Amazon looks dazzling in black and white, with considerable time spent on hypnotic shots of river travel from the boat's prow. Economic exploitation as manifested in the ugly conditions on rubber plantations is a recurring motif, climaxing in an Apocalypse Now-ish visit to a nightmarish mission combining, as the older Karamakate observes, "the worst of both worlds," with ritual hallucinogens consumed by natives in thrall to a Western missionary who's convinced the Indians he's the Messiah.