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Gabriel Mascaro cheekily explodes coming-of-age tropes by making his triumphant tale of self-discovery against all odds about an elderly woman.

A review by Panagiota Stoltidou

Deep in the Amazonian jungle, Tereza (Denise Weinberg) returns home from work to find laurels hung over the door of her wooden shack. At 77, she’s old enough to be considered “national living heritage” by the authoritarian government of Mascaro’s near-future Brazil, but still has three years left before they ship her off to the so-called colony – a mysterious commune where seniors live out their final years away from society, so that younger citizens may devote their undisturbed energies to boosting economic growth without the added burden of aging parents. This bizarre premise is turned alarmingly plausible by Mascaro’s spare fantastical economy: from aerial propaganda – “the future is for everyone” – and poignant graffiti – “give me back my grandma” – to digital bibles and fish fighting competitions, the film’s intriguing markers of the future are few and far between, and consistently off-center. They don’t figure forth a new world but rather meddle the surface of the one we already inhabit, like dust particles on a negative. In its sweeping vision of ageist authoritarianism, The Blue Trail (O último azul) straddles the thin line between our contemporary reality and its dystopian double.

When the state lowers the age threshold for admission to the colony to 75, no amount of laurels or medals can offer Tereza an out, and she runs away in a stubborn attempt to fulfill a longstanding aspiration: boarding a plane. Yet she’s no longer able to make card purchases without the authorization of Joana (Clarissa Pinheiro), her daughter and new legal guardian, and is therefore denied access to all state-controlled, commercial flights. Through word of mouth, she hears of a clandestine aircraft that she could pay for under the table in the port of Itacoatiara, and persuades shady riverboat captain Cadu (Rodrigo Santoro) to take her there. What we get is an Odyssey in reverse, wherein the people that Tereza meets along the way assist rather than impede her journey, and the Ithaca she’s seeking out no longer holds the promise of redemptive homecoming, but that of open-aired emancipation from the demands of familial and social ties. The tonal move from absurd dystopianism à la Yorgos Lanthimos to road trip extravaganza is attended by cinematographer Guillermo Garza’s sharp shift from overpowering white hues to lush, near-erotic blues and greens, as the sleek, claustrophobic interiors of the alligator meat processing plant where Tereza used to work are displaced by expansive vistas of the Amazon’s waterways.

Earlier this month, Mascaro’s film – the recipient of the Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize at the 75th Berlinale – closed off an open-air edition of the festival in Freiluftkino Friedrichshain, where movie-goers were able to revisit four award-winning films from this year’s Competition prior to their official theatrical release. It rained for the entire screening, yet few people left the park. Those of us who stayed embraced the heavy downpour as an inside joke: our shared predicament couldn’t be farther from the tropical adventure on-screen, but in our drenched state we were also entering an immediate sensorial kinship with Tereza, who is shown partially or fully submerged in water for much of the film. It’s this aquatic affinity that helps her renegotiate her relation to both world and self; a later scene shows her bathe on-board the ship of her new friend and kindred spirit Roberta (Miriam Socarrás), and we’re invited to sit back and relish Tereza’s fresh-eyed exploration of her feminine physique and suntanned skin, made near-iridescent by the bucketful of water rippling over it. In this dazzlingly colored landscape, Tereza’s own body has become another site for wondrous discovery.

With Tereza and Roberta, Mascaro’s also crafted an honest display of late-life friendship that revolves less around medical troubles and existential fears and more around a shared desire for freedom and adventure. Talking to Rafa Sales Ross for Variety ahead of his film’s premiere in February, the director voiced an intention to rescue aging bodies from their fixed cinematic function as nostalgic signifiers of a cherished past. It’s a feat that his film accomplishes with flare, launching the bodies of its two elderly protagonists back into the chaos of a life lived fully, amidst the unpredictable physical potentialities of the present. These include swimming and dancing, nocturnal excursions into spas, gambling dens, and – more thrillingly still – the future, after the women discover a rare blue snail that’s said to excrete a hallucinogenic slime. Used as eye drops, the slime offers a private portal into a person’s fate. Though Mascaro smartly forbids us the voyeuristic glimpse into Tereza’s prophetic trip, one thing is certain: Brazil’s rivers and tributaries will be laying a far bigger claim on her future than the state ever could.