Director – Gabriel Macaro – 2025 – Brazil, Netherlands, Mexico, Chile – Cert. 12a – 86m
***1/2
A 77-year-old woman, learning she is to be rehoused at a state home for the elderly, refuses to comply, instead setting out to fulfil a long-held dream – out in UK cinemas on Friday, April 17th
Tereza (Denise Weinberg), 77, is doing fine thank you very much, supporting herself with a job in an alligator slaughterhouse. All that changes when the government lowers the age at which people are considered too old to be economically productive and relocated to the out of town elderly home known simply as The Colony, about which details are in scant supply. The name carries with it specific cultural associations, since The Colony was a notorious, Brazilian psychiatric prison used for the purposes of removing from mainstream society individuals deemed undesirable or unacceptable for whatever reason by the authorities, as portrayed in the drama Nobody Leaves Alive (André Ristum, 2023). Further afield, in Chile, the name conjures the equally if not more notorious detention centre of the Pinochet regime which features in the drama The Colony (Florian Gallenberger,2015). The name of the institution doesn’t bode well on either account.
The narrative opens with a political manifesto pledge containing the slogan, “The Future is for Everyone”, immediately the subject of loudhailer messages and words towed through the sky by light aircraft. Tereza returns home one day to find a wreath put up around the front door of her modest home commemorating her as an elderly person, along with form-filling government bureaucrats asking unwanted questions and informing her that she will shortly be transported to The Colony. It’s an unwarranted intrusion on her life with which she clearly has no intention of complying.
The immediate effect of all this is to make her ponder things she’s always wanted to do but never got around to doing because the demands of her job and everyday living got in the way. Prominent of her list is that she’s never flown anywhere, so she heads straight to the local travel agent to book the first return trip to anywhere that she can. At this point she encounters a problem; the same legislation that mandated her imminent move to The Colony now requires any expenditure she wishes to make by credit card to be approved by her next of kin, and her daughter won’t furnish any such approval. (It’s not a thousand miles away from the women in Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale waking up one day to discover that those of their gender can no longer make use of credit cards.)
Undeterred, and determined to see her dream of flying through, Tereza looks for ways of paying by cash and chartering a boat down the Amazon captained by Cadu (Rodrigo Santoro from Westworld, TV series, 2016-20; Che Parts 1 & 2, Steven Soderburgh; Lost, TV series, 2006-7; 300, Zach Snyder, 2006). He takes her down river to Ludemir (Adanilo), a pilot who can fulfil her wishes if only he can repair his grounded plane, for which replacement parts and repair work will cost her quite a bit of money. She pays him in stages, but ultimately, as the bill goes up, her money runs out before he can fully complete the job. Finally, she winds up with another elderly woman Roberta (Miriam Socorrás from Chico and Rita, Tono Errando, Javier Mariscal, Fernando Trueba, 2009), a likeable charlatan who sells Bibles to raise the necessary ongoing funds that enable her to travel around on her own boat without succumbing to the state’s relocation demands…
The film has the feel of a road movie – perhaps one should refer to it as a river movie, since Tereza’s journey and the various, suitably quirky characters she encounters trying to realise her dream are the elements that hold your attention. Sadly, director Macaro doesn’t seem to know quite where to take his bold and original idea, and the proceedings drift into nowhere towards the end.
There is much to admire before that happens, though, and at a mere 86 minutes, the piece can scarcely be considered overlong. The best things in it are what Tereza labels Wrinkle Wagons, motorised cages designed to take away any elderly people who won’t play ball. Underneath it all lies the depiction of an alarmingly ageist regime where worker productivity has been prioritised above all else and old people are carted off out of sight to who-knows-where once they cease to be considered economically productive. With various societies around the globe leaning ever further to the Right, such situations are perhaps less far-fetched today than they might have seemed decades ago.
The Blue Trail is out in cinemas in the UK on Friday, April 17th.
Trailer: