The Fever (Maya Da-Rin, 2019) (Patreon)

...although it's a bit tempting to refer to this film as The Highly Symbolic Fever, since the mysterious illness is a big clunky metaphor. And while it doesn't exactly spoil Da-Rin's debut feature, it does prove rather overbearing, like too much salt in a stew. The Fever is the sort of film that provokes an ambivalence I suspect is common to critics and cinephiles, and possibly unique to our kind. If you don't see a lot of movies, The Fever's formal exactitude and strong performances will most likely be the properties of the film you'll take away with you. But of you see dozens of festival films, the conceptual similarities to Apichatpong and Lisandro Alonso are harder to ignore.

This is the story of Justino (Regis Myrupu), a man in his forties who is originally from the Brazilian Amazon but now lives in the port city of Manaus. He is of the indigenous Tukano people, and the guys at work refer to him, with some condescension, as "The Indian." He is a guard and safety officer at the port, watching cargo containers being stacked and lifted from ships onto tractor-trailers. He is a widower, and while his son and his family have their own place elsewhere in Manaus, his daughter Vanessa (Rosa Peixoto) lives with him. She works as a pharmacist, and has just been accepted to medical school in Brasilia, with a full scholarship.

Justino begins feeling sick just as Vanessa receives her acceptance letter. And although he has been reasonably comfortable with his urban life up to now, he begins to feel the anxiety of cultural dislocation, the sense that he is not really a "white" Brazilian but no longer fully a part of his indigenous tribe. This alienation is driven home when Justino's older brother (Edmildo Vaz Pimentel) and his wife (Anunciata Telese Soares) come to visit, and remind him of what he left behind.

There's a basic frustration that comes with watching The Fever, since it is a meticulous, sensually rich work of cinema, but its statement about cultural liminality is neither surprising nor profound. Da-Rin makes precisely the statement one would expect a well-connected filmmaker to make, and the Tukano culture is presented as an unproblematic source of spiritual wholeness, one to which Justino should return. The introduction of a supernatural, Apichapongian element (a wild creature on the loose) only underscores Justino's divided self, a point that hardly needed additional emphasis. The Fever is a strong first film, but Da-Rin must loosen the reins and trust her audience to draw some unanticipated conclusions.