“Since when was getting older an honour?” asks Tereza, rightly suspicious when she finds officials nailing up a cheap garland around her front door and presenting her with a medal. This is Brazil, sometime in the near future, and the government has decided that anyone over 75 is an economic burden on younger workers. No matter how fit you still are, you must hand in your work clothes and accept being shipped off to ‘the colony’ on a caged truck dubbed the wrinkle wagon.
Gabriel Mascaro’s The Blue Trail is a dystopian fable, not dissimilar in its plot and casting to the more sombre Japanese futurist drama, Plan 75 in which seniors were offered voluntary euthanasia with perks. Both films cast a charismatic actress, acclaimed in their respective countries, and focused on their character ‘s response to reaching their sell-by date in the eyes of an ageist and ageing society. But where Plan 75 was relentlessly bleak, Mascaro has taken a far more spritely and visually stunning approach. Casting the feisty theatre and film veteran Denise Weinberg as Tereza is just the beginning of what becomes an epic tale of surreal adventures in the Brazilian landscape.
Tereza works in a factory processing alligator meat when she’s told to hand over her uniform and accept redundancy. But she’s nowhere near ready to go quietly into that good night. She has a lifelong dream to achieve – to fly in an aeroplane. The government however has decided that anyone over 75 is now the responsibility of their children and her daughter won’t give her permission. Tereza finds herself in a grim holding camp where old people are forced to wear incontinence pads before being shipped off to the colony. No-one one has been known to return; Tereza stages an ingenious escape.
Hearing of a seaplane in a settlement along the river, she bribes Cadu (Rodrigo Santoro, unrecognisable if you only know him from Love Actually), a dissolute riverboat captain with a ramshackle barge. Tereza also teems up with Roberta (Miriam Soccaras), a charismatic travelling bible saleswoman who has found a way to escape the wrinkle wagon. What follows is a wonderfully picaresque voyage along the Amazon (pictured above), past mountains of used tires, through an abandoned amusement park filled with decaying statues and an encounter with hallucinogenic snail slime.
Mascaro has a background as a visual artist and documentarian and he certainly knows how to capture Brazil’s extraordinary landscapes. Riverbanks may be framed by lush jungles but on the horizon is an industrial future of high rises and smoking factories. While there are riverine echoes of Herzog (Fitzcarraldo, Aguirre), Charles Laughton’s Night of the Hunter and John Huston's The African Queen, what Mascaro has created is unique: an intriguing mash up of magic realism, futurist satire and comedy. If the narrative takes one turn too many in the last third of the film, it’s still a wild ride down the river of dreams.
