NEW DIRECTORS/NEW FILMS 2020 (March 25-April 5, 2020)

[Chris Knipp]

MAYA DA-RIN: THE FEVER (2019)



Tristes tropiques

The focus of this low keyed film about Amazonian indigenous people is Justino (Regis Myrupu), an impassive Desana man who has long lived and worked in Manaus, the Brazilian port city often in the news for Amazonian forest fires and gang violence. He works as an industrial site security guard - like a hunter with nothing to hunt, he says, showing he still has the old mindsets. He lives with his grown daughter Vanessa (Rosa Peixoto), who works in a hospital but has received a scholarship to medical school in Brasilia and will go there on her own for six years, leaving Justino alone. Whether it's this prospect causing the mysterious fever that now infects Justino or a deeper malaise of jungle longing years in the making we don't know. Nor does he, but he has strange dreams and, like Freud, he believes in them.

There are also hints sent out from the news that some mysterious beast is on the prowl; Justino sees it stirring when he returns from work one evening. and later it chews through the industrial wire fence. Justino and Vanessa discuss it with his older brother, who lives back in the territories but comes to visit and urges Justino to visit him, to breathe. But Justino is under the thumb of his controlling industrial employer, who apparently won't even let him have a few days of sick leave. His only visible coworker is a white man in the locker room who drops racist anti-Indian hints.

Justino seems a man bereft of good cheer. Myrupu's performance, impressive enough to get him a festival acting award, is an example of the ineloquent in art. His impassiveness suggests a strained stoicism. The isolation of indigenous people, the underlying theme, has been bluntly hinted in the film early on by the appearance of a woman who turns up in Vanessa's hospital, speaking an indigenous language nobody knows and knowing no other.

In his brief Now Toronto review of this film Kevin Ritchie notes its emphasis on repetition, "the banality of industry" (actually somewhat aestheticized), the "intense sound design and darkness/shadow" (noises, whether of machinery or dogs, always turned up), and the messages delivered of "cultural and environmental erosion" pointedly delivered. Ritchie points out that since "the conceit all hinges on Justino’s stoicism" he tends to "seem like a blank canvas for the filmmaker" - one that most of the time simply remains blank. ("Bressonian" perhaps, since Bresson called his actors "models.")

For a while, The Fever builds suspense. What is this fever, we would like to know. But when no answer is forthcoming, the action turns anticlimactic and blank. "Primarily a mood piece," as Ritchie says. The suspense turns out to have been a red herring. A subtler actor and a richer script could have delivered more on this important theme.

The Fever/A Febre, 98 mins., debuted at Locarno, where Regis Myrupu won the best actor award; in at least a dozen other festivals, including the delayed Dec. 2020 pandemic virtual New Directors/New Films, as part of which it was screened for this review.