The Blue Trail: review

★★★★☆

The Blue Trail (O Último Azul), this year’s winner of the Berlin International Film Festival Grand Jury Prize, is probably unlike most things you’ve seen before. Set in a quasi-dystopian – although not techno-futuristic – near-present Brazil, the film shows us a country that now sends all citizens over 80 to housing colonies, so that they don’t hinder the productivity of younger citizens. The protagonist Tereza, played sublimely by Denise Weinberg, refuses to comply with this and sets out on a journey down the Amazon in an attempt to fulfil her dream of flying. 

Speaking in Cinema Trindade in Porto, the director Gabriel Mascaro expressed his frustration at the way that stories about the elderly tend to unfold in cinema. When doing research for this film, he explained that he struggled to find films with elderly protagonists that weren’t about figures stuck in the past; frail bodies already dead to the present and simply waiting to die. The Blue Trail certainly opens up a path for a new way of filming old age, centred in a body of the present that still desires. 

This does not mean that Mascaro’s film shies away from the physicality of ageing: quite the opposite. With a 4:3 aspect ratio and frequent close-up shots, Weinberg’s body constantly takes up the screen. In one of the most beautiful scenes in the film, Tereza teaches Roberta (Miriam Soccarras) – an elderly ship captain she meets along the way – to dance. Their bodies and faces, close together, consume the screen.  

Although the film flirts at times with the mystical, there is nothing transcendent about it. One of the recurring elements of the plot is a snail whose trail is blue. This is a snail that, the film tells us, is only found when it wants to be and, when its trail is dripped into the eye, leads to visions that show one’s future. Importantly, when Tereza places the drops in both her eyes and those of Roberta we do not see their visions, only their bodies reacting to the effects of the substance. Mascaro seems to be able to play with the magical while always grounding himself in the earthly.

This is where the film’s setting is also very important. Here the Amazon is another body, far more ancient than Tereza’s but just as neglected. On her first boat trip, Tereza finds a bank covered with tyres that have been returned to the place their material first got cut down from. Outside the lush, green Amazonian wilderness, the towns and habitations seen in the film are poor and run-down. Although the society borders on dystopian, there is no technology in the film – as Mascaro himself points out – that doesn’t exist today. Everything is within the realm of the possible, and that makes it all the more affecting.

The original title does not actually translate to ‘The Blue Trail’ but instead to ‘The Last Blue’, which I think is key as a frame to the film. When discussing genre, Mascaro stated that he drew both from dystopian and coming-of-age films because they tend to centre themes of rebellion and self-discovery. Tereza, a single mother working all the time, at one point says that she never really had the time to think about what she wanted to do but that she still feels a desire to do something. She eventually decides on flying, and this is what takes her on a journey through the Amazon River in search of an ultra-light aircraft to take her. 

One flight, one radical moment of freedom before allowing herself to be sent to the colonies, the last blue. What she finds instead, aided by both the blue of the river and the snail trail, is arguably a much more profound freedom: an entirely new way of living, one which would have been impossible for her to picture at the start of the film and which rejects all forms of control. A future that the film does not close off for us, but is open and unfolding: the last blue.