Dir: Gabriel Mascaro, Brazil/Mexico/Netherlands/Chile, 2025, 86 mins Portuguese with subtitles
Cast: Denise Weinberg, Rodrigo Santoro, Miriam Socarras
Review by Carol Allen
The authorities are painting the system as well deserved retirement though we suspect it’s going to be the care home from hell. But this is not really a film for sci-fi buffs – we never actually see those colonies – but a human story about one of those older people, who decides she wants to rule her own fate, thank you very much and embarks on a journey along the Amazon to do so.
The woman is 77 year old widow Tereza (Denise Weinberg), who is working in a meat factory. Not a pleasant job but she’s sort of content. Life looks pretty basic from what we see of this society. Tereza and her neighbours live in simple shacks and everyone looks pretty poor. However when Tereza is told that the age of mandatory retirement has been reduced from 80 to 75, so she’s now under the guardianship of her daughter and is going to be forcibly relocated, she decides “no”, there are things she still wants to do with what’s left of her life, like for instance fly in an aeroplane.
But when she tries to buy a ticket, she’s refused because she doesn’t have her daughter’s permission. So she embarks on her personal odyssey, which involves paying a grumpy boatman Cadu (Rodrigo Santoro) who eventually warms to her, to take her in his run-down boat on his journey up the Amazon and an amateur pilot whose plane looks like its flying days are over. However she’s then picked up by the authorities and put in the “wrinklies wagon”, as it’s known but escapes her fate with a clever ruse involving a wet nappy and a Portaloo. She then encounters a fellow oldie, Roberta (Miriam Socarras), an atheist but known as “the Nun” ,because she has found a way of bucking the system by travelling the river in her own boat and selling digital bibles. It’s a turning point for Tereza.
The title of the film is a bit of a double entendre in that yes, it’s a journey film along an arguably blue (at times) river but it also comes from a (fictional) blue snail which lives in that river and whose slime has a hallucinogenic effect, which supposedly helps the user see their own future. Tereza first encounters it when Cadu uses it on their boat trip and gets totally stoned. Teresa however, who is old but still survival smart, finds a way of using that blue trail later on to her own advantage.
This is a quiet but tough parable of a film which by implication criticizes the way all societies now tend to undervalue their older citizen, and all held together by a compelling performance from Weinberg
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