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Saturday
Oct102020

NYFF: Yulene Olaizola's "Tragic Jungle"

by Jason Adams

M. Night Shyamalan's name has become synonymous with cinematic puzzlery, but there can be a dulling obviousness to the way he approaches the concept of Mystery, at least in his weakest moments. He genuinely thinks he can explain the unexplainable. His "twists" mostly seem to mash the Unknown into tight little balls we can hold in our hand to exit the theater with. And so it's only the opening passages of his film The Happening, about Mother Nature seeking vengeance against the humans who've abused her so, that retain any sort of power -- Shyamalan spends the remainder of that film piling plot contrivances on top of his original interesting idea until it's the audience who can't breath from the sheer weight of nonsense pouring off the screen.

I'll admit I thought of The Happening while watching the breeze move gently through the rainforest trees of Mexican director Yulene Olaizola's captivating and hypnotic new film Tragic Jungle...

It's as if a sinister sentient presence sifts among the ground-layer ferns and sticks, not to mention the men who walk there. The jungle has a heady movie history standing in for the unknown -- think of Coppola's soldiers floating down his napalm apocalyptic river Styx -- but Olaizola really flips the script, making a film that feels told from the Jungle's own perspective, an out-of-time experience. We don't speak its language, but it speaks to us. This, I thought, is how mystery should feel.

Tragic Jungle begins with a young woman called Agnes (Indira Andrewin) on the run from an older British landowner -- her sister murdered in her arms she finds herself lost in the jungle, enveloped into its folds, as all sorts of men with all sorts of cross-purposes, silly little wars among themselves, seek her out. Agnes is captured by some gum-tree workers who take her along with them as a sort of charm -- we watch these men scar the trees, searing criss-cross wounds up and down its trunks, a white sap puddling in its bark and branches; above the monkeys not so much cry but howl, growl, make unholy sounds. 

One gets the sense, a la The Evil Deads, of the trees themselves moving to make mazes for the men to get lost in -- they circle each other in ever smaller knots, one terrible group pushed towards another terrible group until a confrontation is inevitable and only one survivor -- the Jungle herself -- will stand. Agnes starts out benign enough, with practical queries about men and sex and growing up, giggling as she chews the boys' gum for the first time; Andrewin has a low-key Jennifer Lawrence presence about her, strong but also somehow infantile, precious and breakable, but a trap.

This place and situation becomes quicksand for everybody -- they're halfway swallowed before they start to miss their feet. A horse's eye wild as the animal's floated will-less across a river; a man falling stories silently through wet leaves, unseen -- signifiers that something wrong is working its way between them, but ones the men, with their petty distractions and lip-smacking parlor games, can't pick up on until there are bullets embedded in their cheek. This is not their story. Tragic Jungle is not here for them. They are the mud upon which it stands and feeds, this magnificent unknowable forever.

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