Ciro Guerra & Christina Gallego’s ‘Birds Of Passage’ Is A Colombian Crime Saga Masterpiece [Cannes Review]

We humans have a mania for classification. We divide things into epochs and eras — Triassic, Jurassic, Cretaceous; Elizabethan, Victorian, Edwardian. We draw borders around regions, cutting rivers in half, like the flowing waters care, and creating nations so notional that a sneeze in one can bury a town beneath an avalanche in another. We boil sprawling cultures and variegated ethnicities down to single words, the better to pop up on census forms with a little checkbox next to them, waiting for your x. And if we’re not careful, if we’re not frequently reminded of their artificiality, we can start to see those divisions as real and defined. With the stunning “Embrace of the Serpent,” Ciro Guerra did a mournfully psychedelic job of exploding that misconception a little, imagining the tragedy of colonialism as a long, drawn-out process more defined by the inevitable transformation of an ancient way of life than its annihilation, as though the modern era was hallucinated into being by a past that, as Faulkner said, is not dead; it is not even past. And with “Birds of Passage,” the new film Guerra co-directed with his ‘Embrace’ producer and partner Christina Gallego, that beautiful and strange project is continued and expanded upon, into the troubled and often violent Colombia of the late 20th century, an era when airplanes and mirrored sunglasses and foreign exploitation commingled with the beads and silks and superstitions of tribal life, and gave rise to the phenomenon we recognize today as the Colombian drug trade. This is an absolutely extraordinary film.

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On one level it is easier to embrace than ‘Embrace,’ given that it unfolds as a kind of dynastic rise-and-fall story, a Colombian ‘Godfather‘ spanning the late ’60s and ’70s, divided into 5 lyrically named chapters, or “cantos”: Wild Grass, The Graves, Prosperity, The War and Limbo. It starts, as do most such epics, with a young man who craves social betterment. Here it is Rapayet (José Acosta) the nephew of a respected “word messenger,” who exists on the periphery of the Wayuu tribe of northern Colombia, and wants to consolidate his standing by marrying the beautiful  Zaida (Natalia Reyes), a young Wayuu woman to whom we’re introduced in a glorious billow of blood-red silk and face paint during her ritual “coming out party.” Reluctant to give Zaida’s hand in marriage to someone not in the inner circle, her mother Ursula (a blazing Carmiña Martínez, giving us the best ruthless clan matriarch since Jacki Weaver in “Animal Kingdom“) sets a near-impossible dowry. But Rapayet, along with his loose-cannon friend and business partner Moises (Jhon Narváez) makes a deal with some Peace Corps soldiers, stationed in the area ostensibly as a bulwark against communism, but really just looking for a regular supply of weed. And with a few quick flips, Rapayet has not only made the money to meet Zaida’s dowry, he’s made the connections that will soon make his extended family the most powerful in the region.

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But not everyone is as level-headed as Rapayet. The alijuna (outsider) Moises quickly becomes a trigger-happy liability and later Ursula’s younger son Leonidas (Gredier Meza), a dyspeptic brat of a child, will grow up into a sociopathic, cruel, bottle-blond Crown Prince, a kind of Colombian Commodus, giving the family dynamics of “Birds of Passage” the dimensions of a Greek tragedy. And throughout it all, Ursula and Zaida are beset by portentous dreams in which their children’s faces wear shrouds, and Rapayet is haunted by the yoluja (ghost) of the friend he betrayed in the name of family honor.

The Coppola parallels are writ large, but the early portion also owes a great deal to the Scorsese of “Mean Streets” in its depiction of the bonds of brotherhood among low-level hoodlums on the make, while the film is also saturated with imagery from genre westerns — John Ford doorway silhouettes and Sergio Leone widescreen vistas that echo with sussurating crickets and the screeching of unseen animals, as well as with the exotic instrumentation and pounding tribal percussion of Leonardo Heiblum‘s uncanny score. But in the ethnographic strangeness that lurks in the corner of every frame, there is also something of Nicolas Roeg‘s “Walkabout,” and not since Zhang Yimou‘s House of the Flying Daggers” has there been a film more sensuously dedicated to the texture and colors of richly dyed fabrics and traditional textiles.

DP David Gallego (who also shot ‘Embrace’ and Rungano Nyoni‘s “I Am Not A Witch” and must surely now be counted among our foremost working cinematographers) finds explodingly colorful compositions that embody the tension between old and new, and between the often tacky trappings of Western-style new money, and the untameable natural world with which the Wayuu used to live in harmony. The greatest example is the folly of Rapayet’s flashy mansion, looking like something out of the “The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills,” standing white, spare and architect-designed on baked earth cracked like pottery glaze, with the hot, crazy-making desert wind blowing ceaselessly though even its interior corridors.

By locating this story within the indigenous population who become as much the architects of their own downfall as the Westerners they supply (who only exist on the periphery of this film), Guerra and Gallego along with screenwriters Maria Camila Arias and Jacques Toulemonde, have written Colombia’s tribal history back into the story of Colombia’s conflicted present. The Wayuu here are neither exploited innocents nor backward savages, but flawed humans indulging recognisable human instincts of greed and rapaciousness, and who have a hierarchical social system in place that is not so exotically alien that it cannot be easily crossbred with Western-style wealth and corruption. And so “Birds of Passage” is not squeamish about violence, and does not ignore the bigger sociological and geopolitical forces at work. But it does march to its own, slow, chantlike rhythm, depicting not a clash, but a continuity where colonialism seeded capitalism, which in turn bred conflicts in which ethnic Colombians were as complicit as they were victimized. The lack of sentimentality is startling.

And that clear-eyed revision of accepted history has resonance far beyond the borders of Colombia. You do not have to have Wayuu ancestry, or any connection to the region to understand the broader implications of this epic story of haunted druglords and ruthless power grabs that are partly predicated on traditional beliefs and shibboleths. Guerra and Gallego’s film is no dusty period piece, it is wildly alive, yet it reminds us that no matter how modern we are, there are ancient songs our forebears knew whose melodies still rush in our blood. We are not creatures of one era or another or of one place or another, we are only ever birds of passage between our mythic pasts and our unwritten futures, being tossed around by the wind. [A]

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