Review: Birds of Passage Is a Doom-Laden Grappling with Cultural Memory

Money corrupts, Cristina Gallego and Ciro Guerra’s would say. Easy money corrupts completely.

Birds of Passage
Photo: The Orchard

In the first of five parts that make up Cristina Gallego and Ciro Guerra’s Birds of Passage, two Colombian men look wonderingly at a group of American Peace Corps volunteers frolicking on a beach. The men just sold the Americans some weed, and are flush with cash for probably the first time in their lives. Moisés (Jhon Narváez), a fun but careless partier, says joyfully, “Weed is the key to happiness.” His friend, Rapayet (José Acosta), a somewhat glum member of the Wayuu tribe, says sourly, “Their happiness.” Although the film is replete with suffering, bloodshed, and a host of cultural and familial indignities, none of that will be visited on the beaming Americans whose need for weed fuels everything that follows.

A narcotrafficking origin story embedded inside an ethnographic study of a vanishing culture, Birds of Passage starts and ends in the harsh Guajira desert peninsula that sticks into the Caribbean Sea from northern Colombia. Showing the same fascination with the interstices of Western and native cultures that Guerro and Jacques Toulemonde Vidal brought to Embrace of the Serpent, the story initially takes a back seat to an examination of ritual and belief. The ceremony that starts the film, an elaborate dance celebrating the introduction of the teenaged Zaida (Natalia Reyes) to the Wayuu tribe, is visually stunning for the way the girl sweeps about in a circle of villagers, her blazing red dress billowing in the high wind that perpetually blows across the harsh desert plain that the villagers’ rough shelters are perched on.

Rapayet, one of Zaida’s dance partners, keeps running afoul of the intricate traditions surrounding everything from communication to dowries. Nevertheless, with the help of his weed-dealing bounty that comes courtesy of his uncle Aníbal’s (Juan Bautista Martínez) mountaintop farm, Rapayet comes up with the dowry. Even though Zaida’s mother, village matriarch Úrsula (Carmina Martinez), doesn’t approve of Rapayet’s methods, she ultimately accepts him and his offerings, effectively setting the stage for everyone’s downfall.

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Once the film shifts to its second part, set just three years later, already the happy-go-lucky windfall of Rapayet and Moisés’s weed pipeline to the north has metastasized and uglified. None of what follows—a pointless murder, escalating levels of pride and greed announced with eruptions of shocking violence—is going to be much surprise to anybody who remembers any story ever about the meteoric rise of a drug cartel, or even just The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Money corrupts, this film would say. Easy money corrupts completely.

While the basics of the narrative are familiar from other stories about how Colombia tore itself apart serving America’s drug culture, Birds of Passage stands apart for Gallego and Guerra’s studied focus on the drip-drip-drip of traditions falling before encroaching modernity as Rapayet’s family grows in wealth and shrinks in awareness. Also, their arresting visual sense power the story in the eeriest of ways, from the sweeping vistas of desert and sky to the surreal appearance of a glistening white mansion where an ancient village once stood.

One of the most compelling factors in Birds of Passage’s stately paced gyre of vendetta is its refusal to deploy the “noble native” card. For all the sociological care put into the particulars of Wayuu life, particularly the plot-critical tradition of the protected “word messengers” deputized to communicate between clans, and their depiction of the rot that follows a flood of easy cash, Gallego and Guerra don’t show Rapayet’s family and some of the other Wayuu as innocent victims in all this. At every step of the way, they’re given excellent reasons to not follow the cartel path and yet they continue marching forward. By the conclusion of this stark and potent epic, it seems the only traditions that remain, sternly adhered to by the iron-willed Ursula, are the ones that will hasten the family’s self-destruction.

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Score: 
 Cast: José Acosta, Natalia Reyes, Carmiña Martínez, John Narváez, Greider Meza, José Vicente Cote, Juan Bautista Martínez, Miguel Viera, Sergio Coen  Director: Cristina Gallego, Ciro Guerra  Screenwriter: Maria Camila Arias, Jacques Toulemonde  Distributor: The Orchard  Running Time: 125 min  Rating: NR  Year: 2018

Chris Barsanti

Chris Barsanti has written for the Chicago Tribune, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Publishers Weekly, and other publications. He is a member of the National Book Critics Circle and Online Film Critics Society.

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