In the frantic dark, a canoe carrying a shaman and an explorer makes its way across the Amazon River. Rounding one bend, the canoe re-emerges a moment later, carrying still the shaman but this time with another explorer, decades later.
Time and space appear to collapse in “Embrace of the Serpent,” a film about cycles, souls, memory and the revolving door of human violence. It is one of five movies this month that wind their ways through history and reveal the horrors — also the hilarity and absurdity — of ideology and power. Within these stories are people straining to escape from under the thumb of forces larger than them.
‘Embrace of the Serpent’ (2016)
The story at the center of the Colombian director Ciro Guerra’s film — explorers entering the heart of a jungle and reckoning with the waste colonial violence has wrought — will bring to mind the seminal works of Conrad and Coppola.
That lineage casts a big shadow, but “Embrace of the Serpent” is a masterwork in its own right. That’s not only because it considers colonialism from an Indigenous perspective, via Karamakate, an isolated shaman aiding two different white researchers 40 years apart. The film also serves as a kind of hypnotic elegy about the sweep of power across time, along with the peoples and cultures, the songs and stories, that are lost in its grasp.
“Where are the chants that mothers used to sing to their babies?” wonders the shaman, the last of his people. “Where are the stories of the elders, the whispers of love, the chronicles of battle?”
‘Wendy and Lucy’ (2008)
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In an Oregon grocery store, Wendy, a homeless loner trying to make her way to Alaska to find work, is caught stealing two cans of food for her dog, Lucy. The young bag boy, with a gold cross dangling from his neck, demands that the cops be called. The rules, he insists, must apply to everyone.
The scenario is like an Ethics 101 thought experiment and emblematic of Kelly Reichardt’s quietly shattering film about the cold, hard struggle of staying alive and sane in this country. After Wendy is hauled away for her petty crime, Lucy goes missing. Wendy’s frantic search for her dog drives the film, as one stroke of bad luck turns into a story of falling through the cracks.
“You can’t get an address without an address, you can’t get a job without a job,” laments an elderly security guard that Wendy befriends. “It’s all fixed.” Later, when Wendy is forced to sleep in the woods for a night, she wakes up to a strange man towering over her. “They treat me like trash, like I ain’t got no rights,” he hisses into the wind, to nobody.
It’s a terrifying moment for Wendy. The real horror, though, is perhaps that the man was once her too, desperately trying to prevent one stumble from becoming a descent.
‘Timbuktu’ (2014)
What’s most striking about this mosaic portrait of Timbuktu, as the Malian city exists under the rule of Islamist radicals, is what’s absent. Flitting between scenes of jihadists and the townspeople they lord over, there is little of the bombastic violence our imagination expects. Oppression, after all, usually means silence rather than chaos.
There is, in this way, an economical elegance to Mauritanian director Abderrahmane Sissako’s film. The aftermath of the film’s inciting incident, when a cattle herder kills a fisherman, is captured in one wide shot: the herder runs from one end of a lake, while the wounded man is left, gasping for life. It’s an entire parable in one astonishing shot.
Soon, the shepherd is brought before the jihadists, who operate according to the harsh dictates of Sharia law, even as they often appear contradictory and uncertain. Sissako is never didactic nor sensationalist — what we see here is just another rule that has moved in, almost clumsily so. The film is more frequently populated by images of tranquil beauty and ordinary life that persist under the blanket of fear.
‘The Death of Stalin’ (2017)
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It might appear incongruent to make a feature-length comedy about the power struggle that occurred after the death of the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, one of the most ruthless dictators in modern history. But it’s the ludicrousness with which these politicians act, amid such monumentally high stakes, that sharpens the point of Armando Iannucci’s film.
After Stalin’s death, his cabinet of men quickly begin to scheme and plot for control, all while tactlessly keeping up the charade of political decorum and allegiance. The irony of that dynamic, and the sobering fact that their games will determine the fate of millions, reveal the utter farce of our human hierarchies: It’s all just blustering animals scrambling for ever taller chairs.
‘The Wind That Shakes the Barley’ (2006)
Ken Loach’s chronicle of the 1919 fight for Irish independence, and the Irish Civil War that followed, remains powerful not just for its raw and grounded depiction of a bloody struggle, but also for its conflicted look at how the terms of freedom are defined.
Damien is a young Irish doctor on his way to work in London before a clash with British officers convinces him to stay and join his brother, Teddy, in the Irish Republican Army. Their fight ultimately leads to a dubious peace treaty that partitions Ireland. After civil war breaks out, Damien and Teddy find themselves fighting on opposing sides.
There’s melodrama to Loach’s premise — a war film pitting brother against brother — and yet it personifies the painfully real and moving stakes of the thorny political debate between them: As they weigh bloodshed and peace, the rich and poor, what does true revolution look like?
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