In Maya Da-Rin’s first narrative feature film, A Febre (The Fever), Justino sits with his grandson Josué in the kitchen of their home in Manaus, a port city in the Brazilian state of Amazonas, and tells him a story about a man who goes hunting against his wife’s wishes. Just as he aims his blowpipe at a monkey, a rain begins to fall, and as he wait for it to pass the man falls asleep. The monkeys then spirit him away to another world where he is paradoxically prized for the way his insight allows him to relieve the pain of suffering animals. Justino’s story unfolds without urgency: it’s unclear how badly the man wants to return home, and how permanent his visit to the spirit world is. He tells the monkeys’ leader that he doesn’t know how to leave, but when the monkey promises to escort the man home, the story ends. Next, a lingering shot of the rainforest at night seems to suggest that the terrestrial world is as intertwined with the realm of the spirits as the night fog that curls around the treetops.
We are used to prodding folktales for cultural meaning, and it’s easy to read parallels between Justino’s life and that of the man in the story, both of whom flit through worlds with an ambiguous degree of agency. He is from the interior, but can find better work in the city, it seems, though his relationship with it is listless – Justino says he’s unable to return his family’s village in the jungle, but dinner table comments to his older brother (“At least you can hunt”) suggest that there may have been a viable life for him there. At times it reads as if he left, drawn by the promise of more, before realising he didn’t know how to return; only vaguely remembering why he departed in the first place. Mirroring the hunter, Justino nods off during his security job at the docks, where he guards shipping containers full of parts from as far away as China, and succumbs to fevered dreams when night falls. These dreams, too, could be picked over for symbolism, but Justino leaves his visions of still-moving animals without organs hanging in the night air, releasing them to his brother’s silent consideration with a “that’s what happened.” Throughout A Febre, both Da-Rin and Justino shy away from conclusions: ethical and medical. It’s important that his story about the man and the monkeys has no definitive ‘ending’ – we never find out whether the man makes it back to his family. Should he, if a seeking impulse drove him to leave them in the first place? It’s clear from the beginning that our hunter is acting in excess. His family asks him not to hunt, as they have plenty of food already, and so something other than immediate need draws him to the jungle. Is his predicament self-imposed? Is it painful? The confusion of Justino’s brother encourages us to read both Justino and Vanessa on the plane of the hunter: Justino has left his native village for Manaus, and Vanessa is preparing to move to Brasília for medical school, each drifting away from their families with uncertain feelings about their trajectories. The city of Manaus is itself a transitory zone, existing at the confluence of two rivers, the Rio Negro and the Solimões; these have been harnessed to produce wealth for the whole country, and as Justino paces across the docks he is a witness to an endless procession of consumer goods.
If we reverse the allegory of monkey and man, then, perhaps the profiteers of the city are the true hunters, disrupting families and ecosystems for the sake of excess; the elder brother notes that with Justino’s salary, he can afford goods which village dwellers cannot, but Justino can see the very same parts he guards at gunpoint spilling from a vendor’s stall, clearly in abundance. The massive cranes restlessly arranging the containers have replaced the hunter’s blowpipe – a method used by tribes indigenous to Brazil and Colombia like the Tucano, to whom Justino belongs – and although the violence they precipitate is less visible than that of the weapon, its consequences are more far-reaching. The focus given to tools, weapons, and the cross-overs between them is also significant in the context of A Febre’s narrative ambiguity: Da-Rin is often interested in the connection between interpretation and aggression. Just as a tool can become a weapon, so too can clinical scrutiny become violence. After Justino is reported for drowsing at work, a woman from the human resources department interrogates him about his wife’s death under the banner of productivity, her empathetic glaze quickly exchanged for the blunt statement that “what’s on the books” carries more value than “how long you’ve been alive.” Next, she asks if Justino’s exhaustion could be related to his “indigenous condition”. When frustrated, a desire to decode turns malevolent. As those around him hold different standards for what constitutes a malady, Justino, of course, harbours little faith in their assessments. After all, he jokes with his brother’s family, “whites” (those descended from Brazil’s Portuguese colonisers) don’t engage – they don’t drink beer made from yuca plants and dance – but label and codify, throwing middlemen and chemical helpers at situations like the wet concrete which Justino and his brother slap into the cracks in the house’s wall. A dog in the jungle surrounding the Manaus shipping yard is reduced, over garbled walkie-talkie, to a “suspicious movement” to be eliminated (shot), so that Justino doesn’t waste the time it would take to differentiate the creature from a real threat. As in Da-Rin’s installations Horizonte de Eventos (Event Horizon, 2012) Camuflagem (Camouflage, 2013), interferences meant to facilitate efficacy instead breed instability.
To impose an interpretation on Justino’s story is to miss its more immediate point. What matters is that the telling of it constituted a moment of connection between grandfather and grandson. Justino relays the tale to the little boy and feeds him at the same time – meat and narrative passing from one body to the next. Such is the relationship which Da-Rin paints between human and surrounding world: longstanding familiarity leads to intuitive understanding. Hasty pathology, like the kind conducted to diagnose Justinos’s workplace fatigue, stands out sorely. At the beginning of the film, when Vanessa treats an old woman in the emergency room who has no documents and speaks a language nobody can recognise, engagement soothes where communication fails. As the woman describes the palm fruits and pineapples she intended to sell at the Manaus port, the words and their significations fall limp in Vanessa’s ears, but her hands reach for the younger woman’s face and envelop it gently. Translation, interpretation, can wait. A hand clasping another cannot. What Vanessa knows is that although understanding can begin many ways, it must begin with connection – sure enough, when two women grasp hands, Da-Rin’s camera pulls us in close, unanswered questions replaced by gratitude. In A Febre, engagement doesn’t mean receiving the world on one’s own terms. It means something beyond interpretation, sitting with someone, or something, accepting that there may be no answers, no second meanings nor additional layers of worth. This way, you resist the violence of silencing by imposition. The sea first instructs us in the importance of observing – and just observing the movement we see, without hastening to harness or decipher it, argues Michael Pearson. If one just “focuses on the sea, and the littoral,” he writes, “then on-going themes and trends become clear and one can escape the shackles of a largely European-derived documentation.”1 Midway through the film, Justino refuses to speculate about his illness with his daughter, as she “wouldn’t understand”, paralysed by the pointlessness, even damage, that can result from going looking for answers. Maybe the most interesting dimension of Justino’s story is that the monkeys and man sharing space and language prompted the latter to channel his energy toward healing rather than harm. When pursuit overtakes empathy we sever ourselves from each other, creating impasses from which only fever dreams can deliver us.
1 Pearson, Michael N. “Littoral Society: The Concept and the Problems.” Journal of World History 17, no. 4 (2006): 353-73.
Bessie Rubinstein is a writer based in New York and one of Another Gaze‘s staff writers.
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