Country: Brazil
Director: Maya Da-Rin
Time: 1 hour and 38 minutes
Where Can I Get It: Amazon ($4.99 to rent); Criterion (free w/subscription)
What It Evokes: Environments transformed, incommensurate belief structures, really deft and subtle filmmaking
Almost all of the world’s natural rubber initially came from latex native to the Amazonian tree hevea brasiliensis. In the late nineteenth century, increased industrial demand for this polymer spurred Brazil’s Rubber Boom. New investment and infrastructure came to Amazon basin settlements like Manaus and Belém, where large landowners operating rubber plantations often violently exploited local indigenous populations charged with collecting latex from rubber trees. (The Boom would end in the second decade of the twentieth century after British commercial agents smuggled seeds out of the country and began commercially breeding rubber trees in Asia.) After Brazil’s 1964 military coup, plans to develop the country’s Amazon region led to the creation of a Free Economic Zone in Manaus (still in force today), which aimed to increase foreign investment by providing tax incentives and preferential commercial advantages to the city’s port and fledgling industry. Since the 1960s, Manaus’ population has grown from around 200,000 to over two million. It has emerged a center of electronics manufacture and assembly in the Americas. As a result, the metropolis has further expanded into the surrounding Amazon rainforest, starkly highlighting the ways in which “development” and urbanization transform physical and mental terrains.
Set in contemporary Manaus, Maya Da-Rin’s magisterial The Fever charts the psychic ruptures caused by the imposition of modern economic and social relations onto indigenous practices and systems of thought. The film centers on Justino, a widowed ethnic Desano who works as a security guard at the city’s largest port. (The film’s actors employ both Portuguese and Tukano, one of over 200 indigenous languages spoken in Brazil.) Justino’s daughter Vanessa, a nurse technician at one of the city’s hospitals, has recently been admitted to medical school in Brasília. As she prepares to depart for the country’s capital, Justino comes down with a mysterious fever that may or may not be related to a strange animal living in the rainforest that has been attacking the city’s livestock. In turn, his illness forces him to confront his own relationship to contemporary life in Manaus.
In some ways, schematizing The Fever through its plot points undermines the film’s extremely deft and subtle treatment of its subject matter by raising the salience of its central metaphor. At base, the work remains a study of character and space. Its primary conceit augments our understanding of the film’s characters, without subsuming them within its demands. By exploring an individual’s attempt to reconcile the structures of life imposed by two cultures that struggle to speak to one another, The Fever depicts a moving story of dislocation from longstanding practices and beliefs. Like the best film, it is at once highly particular and universal in scope.
Throughout the film, each culture (Desano and “Brazilian”) locates itself within a habitat local to Manaus. Modern economic relations manifest at the port, while the Amazon rainforest symbolizes a return to older, more “traditional” forms of being in the world. Within this configuration, Justino’s home (which he shares with his daughter) has embodied an equilibrium state, merging both the “natural” world and contemporary urbanity in its design and emphasis on generational cohesion. Vanessa’s impending matriculation at medical school, while eliciting Justino’s pride, de-stabilizes this balance by fissuring a family structure that ensured forms of continuity—whether or not she will marry a “white man” constitutes a dinner time joke that reveals much in its wake.
Within the port’s confines, Justino works amidst thousands of magnificently colored shipping containers loaded with Chinese-manufactured electronic components destined for assembly in Manaus. There remains a stunning power and beauty in this space—the film is deeply sensitive to color throughout and the port offers viewers its own visual cornucopia. Nonetheless, this habitat subsumes individuals without every really integrating them. In contrast to his Amazonian village (an “organic” environment in which his brother still resides), the port is defined by its modularity—containers are continually stacked, unloaded, moved, and re-arranged. Justino remains one atomized component within a world of component parts (holding yet more component parts within) that never quite binds into a whole. The loading docks instantiate what Lukács termed “reification,” a process whereby some concrete singularity (say, a person) comes to appear like an abstract, fragmented bundle of separable features. Holistic subjectivities transmogrify into detachable components. As such, the port remains a deeply foreign space for Justino—as well as the space within which his own indigenous “foreignness” is most frequently marked by others.
Justino’s malady can be read as both a reaction to the “foreign” imposition of certain patterns of life distinct from those in his village, as well as a metaphor for the ways in which “the Anthropocene” catalyzes its own blowback. After all, fevers manifest an organic system’s reaction to viruses or bacteria originating outside the body. At the same time, fixing the metaphor’s meaning wrests from the work its exquisite subtlety and grace. It presents the film as a riddle capable of being solved. Instead, The Fever remains far more ambiguous and ambitious. Da-Rin, who has previously worked as a documentary filmmaker, evinces sympathies while reserving judgment. As Justino himself notes, life remains easier within the city’s confines in many respects. In particular, modern medicine and its institutions—whose virtues evoke a wry skepticism from Justino—offer his daughter a path out of economic precarity. Nonetheless, Justino struggles to navigate place and purpose within a transformed world. In depicting his search, The Fever emerges a remarkable, gentle, sensitive, and beautiful piece of filmmaking.
Go Down The Recent Brazilian Rabbit Hole With:
Joana Pimenta and Adirley Queirós — Dry Ground Burning (2023)
Kleber Mendonça Filho — Bacurau (2019)