Gabriel Mascaro’s wayward, intriguing feature is a kind of road movie, or maybe river movie – the Amazon, in fact, in Brazil’s remote north-west. It is a film that follows its nose, meandering across land and water, wonderfully shot with fascinating visual compositions. There are occasional weird resemblances to Fitzcarraldo or The African Queen, but filmic allusions are not the point. This is a drama which contrives to transform and liberate its elderly heroine with a series of encounters and vignettes; it is a film about escape and maybe the film itself escapes generic classification, though it’s a problem that disparate ideas and characters are left undeveloped.
On one level, we have a chilling dystopian nightmare about a future society that pretends to value its older citizens by compelling them to leave their homes and live in special “colonies”, a low-cost gerontocidal warehousing of everyone over 75. They are sometimes transported in a special prison vehicle for errant oldsters nicknamed the “wrinkle wagon” – like a dog-catcher’s van – and when they finally have to board the coach taking them to these “colonies” they are issued with humiliating, compulsory adult diapers. But on another level, it is a more realist drama about the way society patronises and erases older people.
Tereza is a 77-year-old widow played by Denise Weinberg with an opaque expression of baffled disapproval which occasionally splits into a gleeful grin; she works in a factory skinning caimans and her grownup daughter has little interest in her. One day she is brusquely told she must leave the modest shack where is perfectly happy and go to one of these colonies. But by faking a lavatorial accident with her adult diaper she boldly escapes being herded on to the coach.
A riverboat captain called Cadu (Rodrigo Santoro) takes the grey-haired fugitive part of the way along the Amazon to where Ludemir (Adanilo), the pilot of a microlight plane, holds out the promise of a flight to somewhere, anywhere. But her real saviour turns out to be Roberta (Miriam Socarras), a woman of around Tereza’s age, who pilots a rackety riverboat and sells digital bibles, despite having no interest or belief in God. She and Tereza become friends, conspirators, maybe lovers.
And everywhere they go, Tereza finds the strange “blue drool snail”, whose watery extrusions cause ecstatic visions if you squeeze droplets into your eyes. She is introduced to this by the half-crazy Cadu, in which role Santoro might surprise those who remember him as the smoothly attractive man in Love, Actually. In fact, I rather regretted his early exit from this film.
The Blue Trail is a generic mashup: it partly has the bittersweet tone of many films about defiant old people, and partly it has something far more subversive and disquieting. The mix of tones is interesting, like chewing cake and cheese at the same time.
• The Blue Trail is in UK and Irish cinemas from 17 April.
