There’s a distant, otherworldly aura to Rebecca Byrne, the teenage protagonist of “Transamazonia,” that is quite befitting of someone who literally dropped from the sky. As a small girl, a plane she was on crashed in the remote depths of the Amazon basin, leaving her the only survivor of the tragedy. Hailed by the media as a miracle child, she has since remained where she fell, carving out a reputation in the rainforest as a Christian faith healer. It’s a testament to Helena Zengel‘s arresting, secretive lead performance that we’re never sure if miracles are Rebecca’s blessing or her branding. This central enigma informs the other, manifold ambiguities of Pia Marais‘s intriguing environmental fable — in which religious mission work and industrial deforestation both pose threats to Indigenous identity.
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Premiering in Locarno’s main competition, with a New York Film Festival slot to come, this is a formally muscular and typically searching fourth feature from South African-born writer-director Marais: Her last film — 2013’s simmering character study “Layla Fourie” — may have been set in her homeland, but her career has otherwise been built on a thoroughly international perspective. Postcolonial questions of belonging and displacement play heavily into “Transamazonia,” which is at pains to avoid overly exoticizing the little-portrayed region of Brazil in which it unfolds, securing the collaboration of the Assurini people of the country’s Trocará Indigenous Territory. (They are collectively credited as associate producers.) Still, there’s an opacity to this ambitious, conscientious film’s characterization on all fronts that hinders our emotional involvement, even as it holds our interest.
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Rebecca isn’t alone in her Amazonian refuge. Her American missionary father Lawrence (Jeremy Xido), who retrieved her after the crash, appears to have taken the tragedy and its location as a spiritual directive of sorts. Establishing his own mission in an abandoned Baptist camp in the jungle, he has made Rebecca the star attraction of his antic evangelical sermons, attended by Indigenous locals who believe that she has healing powers. If she does, Lawrence’s gaudy showmanship as a preacher — with the mission’s makeshift interiors bathed in lurid turquoise light — makes them look an awful lot like malarkey.
A solemn, stoic figure, Rebecca doesn’t seem knowingly complicit in any deceit, which isn’t to say she’s entirely sure of her gifts either. Zengel, the prodigious young German star of Nora Fingscheidt’s “System Crasher” and Paul Greengrass’s “News of the World,” convinces as a still-traumatized young woman who doesn’t entirely know herself — partly through normal adolescent insecurities, and partly through long-term blind spots that her father has carefully maintained. Nine years after the accident, she seems to know little about her mother or the family’s past. But her world is slowly opening up, enabled by friendships she has nurtured with other Indigenous teens, and with it comes a reexamination of her own narrative.
At this moment, however, rather a lot hangs on Rebecca’s supposed magic. Alves (Rômulo Braga), the head of a logging company carrying out illegal deforestation in the area, requests her services for his wife, who has slipped into a long-term coma. The mission is thus drafted into a tense local conflict between the loggers and the local tribes whose land is under threat — if Rebecca can cure his wife, Alves says, he’ll back down. It’s a bind that exposes the Byrnes’ tricky, tenuous status in a community that regards them both as outsiders and allies, and raises the question of whether they’re served or exploited by a mission that provides them with some semblance of spiritual salve.
“Transamazonia” thus functions as a kind of fraught neo-western, with the dense, teeming forest — shot by Mathieu de Montgrand in greens so saturated they sometimes turn to black — standing in for desert as the lawless turf of the genre, warred over by those to whom it belongs and those to whom, in their minds, everything belongs. The Church’s place in this stand-off is up for debate, though Marais’s script (co-written with Willem Drost and Martin Rosefeldt) skirts shy of a stance, watching from a cool distance as these three incompatible factions circle each other. The deforesters make for a clear-cut enemy, but the film feels otherwise guarded in its sympathies, with the Indigenous characters respectfully but never that intimately drawn.
As an atmospheric exercise, however, “Transamazonia” is tactile and seductive, heavy with weather and restless, chirruping sound. It evokes an environment worth defending, for those who were born into it, and makes you understand how others can lose themselves in it, casting aside compasses both geographical and moral. For Lawrence, the Amazon let him design himself anew; for Rebecca, escaping it might be her rebirth.
