With the dreamy, haunting masterpiece Embrace of the Serpent, Colombian director Ciro Guerra secured his country’s first Oscar nomination for best foreign language film. It was an astonishing movie, inverting the colonial themes of Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo and Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, presenting its mythical narrative from the perspective of the indigenous Amazonian tribespeople in the jungles of Vaupés.
Now, Guerra shares directorial credit with his long-time producer, Cristina Gallego, to tell a tale of “gangsters and spirits”, played out against the arresting backdrop of the La Guajira region of northern Colombia. Described by its creators as an investigation of “the great tragedy that would curse us forever; the great taboo that we are not allowed to discuss”, Birds of Passage revisits the birth of the Colombian drug trade as seen through the eyes of an indigenous Wayúu family. The result combines the epic sweep of The Godfather trilogy with the magical realism of Gabriel García Márquez, replacing the monochrome majesty of Embrace of the Serpent with a boldly coloured palette, as richly textured as the story itself.
We open in the Guajira desert, 1968, where a young woman emerges from a traditional rites-of-passage confinement, ready and willing to face the future. Natalia Reyes is mesmerising as Zaida, never more so than during the breathtaking yonna dance in which her blood-red cloak billows behind her like giant wings, ready to take flight. José Acosta is Rapayet, the suitor who asks for Zaida’s hand in marriage and is told that only a substantial dowry of goats, cows, mules and necklaces will secure his goal.
Along with his unruly friend Moisés, Rapayet (who “lost everyone when he was young and grew up among foreigners”) has developed a relationship with the alijunas, or non-Wayúu people, one that has “opened the world to him”. His uncle, the mediating “word messenger” Peregrino (José Vicente Cotes), insists that his connections will bring rewards. Sure enough, a chance encounter with Peace Corps Americans offers an opportunity to make a quick buck selling marijuana, enabling Rapayet to fulfil the dowry and claim his bride.
But such easy riches come at a price. Soon, the earthy textures of the first act are being superseded by an explosion of guns and garish shirts, the imported accoutrements of a trigger-happy lifestyle that threatens to tear these once-proud people apart.
Inspired by the real-life cannabis-trade boom of the 70s and 80s (the “Bonanza Marimbera”), Birds of Passage inflects its investigation of Colombian myth and culture with the iconography of genre cinema. Subtly tipping its head toward a lineage of American crime movies – from the outlaw romanticism of William Wellman’s The Public Enemy to the stylish excess of De Palma’s Scarface – Gallego and Guerra’s paean to a lost world doesn’t shy away from depicting the violence inherent in its subject matter.
Indeed, as the story progresses, so piles of butchered bodies become an increasingly common site. Yet cinematographer David Gallego’s widescreen frame focuses more upon the perpetrators than the carnage, with long shots, cutaways and editorial ellipses undermining traditional visceral thrills, drawing our attention instead toward the self-inflicted wounds of an unfolding catastrophe.
Just as Brando’s Don Corleone was famously squeamish about the drugs trade, so Zaida’s imposing mother, Úrsula (Carmiña Martínez, magnificent) senses from the outset that this flourishing business marks an end rather than a beginning. Opening with the words “the family, the grandmother, the mother”, Birds of Passage depicts a matrilineal society caught in the crossfire of a fratricidal war, a destructive tide that not even Úrsula (who is “capable of anything for my family and my clan”) can stem. No wonder the screen is haunted by deathly visions of Zaida’s grandmother, walking barefoot along a deserted railway line, heading straight for the sea…
The film itself is divided into cantos, while music is a key element throughout, interwoven through the fabric of the film. The sound of song bookends the drama, plaintively performed by a shepherd who sings to remember “the story of love, desolation, wealth, and pain… in the place of dreams and memory”.
Live drumming accompanies the yonna, thunderous and thrilling, while Leonardo Heiblum’s superbly expressive score employs mournfully natural tones which seem to seep from the landscape itself. It’s powerfully affecting fare; elegiac, evocative and profoundly cinematic.
