NYFF '24: All hail "Pepe," the audacious!

by Cláudio Alves

How does one even start to describe Pepe? Or make sense of it? Nelson Carlo de Los Santos Arias's latest feature is many things – the biography of the first and last hippo to be killed in the Americas, an oblique look at Pablo Escobar's legacy and impact, an experimental travelogue, a political reckoning with the scars of colonialism in Colombia, a non-fiction and narrative hybrid, an ethnography, a poem, a thesis on the Transatlantic Slave Trade. It's everything, everywhere, all at once, an audacious piece of cinema that doesn't lack ideas or ambition, so multifaceted as to leave one dizzy. Somehow, it all works. I'd go as far as saying Pepe is one of the year's best and most essential films…

It all starts with Escobar's demise and a country caught between rejoice and relief. A flurry of news footage mixes with military chatter over the radio, mentions of the Calvary, the rumblings of a talking hippo sailing through a lake full of crocodiles. Oh, that last part is a cartoon, another puzzle piece in this multimedia mural, and the televisual origin of our protagonist's name – Pepe. That's who the soldiers are after, mobilized to take down the rampaging water beast. In the dark, Arias and DPs Roman Lechapelier and Camilo Soratti illuminate the men's faces through passing lights, a dance of shadows swirling over them as they prepare to kill. 

If possible, the use of sound is even bolder. Instead of showing the shootout as it happens, the film remains faithful to the pitch-black midnight, the screen an unintelligible void. So, the foley takes over, suggesting a whole environment and action. When some visuals manifest, they're deliberately unhelpful, a flash of gunshot or a vehicle's eye-like headlight, staring unblinkingly at what we cannot see. From there, Pepe cuts to a God's eye view, darkness to a landscape lit by the African sun. A voice narrates over the new sights, the hippo's cavernous growl reaching us beyond the threshold of death. Pepe speaks a story of displacement.

Here, Pepe, the film, becomes a post-mortem memory play, folding experimental technique into historical reflection, an animal's purview of a restless country that became its prison and its grave. But first, there are stories of a continent that Pepe never knew in the flesh as he was born in captivity. They were learned from elders' eyes, the scars across their bodies having much to tell. Counterpointing the picture's arthouse abstraction, these notions point toward the material as a recording of generational memory, of the truths oppressive forces try to erase. And, as if to highlight the animalistic salience of his storytelling, Arias renders humans alien.

Consider a passage focused on a safari tour, presented with rehearsed spiel and strange cuts. What should feel perfunctory becomes defamiliarized. It immerses us in the perspective of someone, or something, that doesn't quite understand humans. Another passage sees the helicopters that stole the animals from their homeland. Only, they aren't perceived through human terms either. Instead, the film shows shadows over the landscape and a horrible mechanical cry breaking the natural peace. Those things are cancerous dots on the bright disk of the sun, able to cross countries, continents, and sometimes even cinematic language.

A cascade of formal changes – aspect ratio, medium, color – furthers the idea of being unmoored, hammering the point into the spectator through visceral terms. The language used in the narration plays a similar game. Helicopters are described as flying things that make a lot of noise, and the ocean is a river whose bottom can't be reached. Since the hippos have never experienced these things, why would they have words for them? Yet, their lack of vocabulary is not a lack of understanding. As the journey continues, Pepe's idiom goes through a metamorphosis. Mbukushu turns to Afrikaans. And in the middle of the Atlantic, where the new world becomes nearer than the old, Spanish takes over.

Tormented by a curse that smells of death, gringo and arepa, the hippos are treated like property instead of living beings and find their "culture" forcefully eroded. And that's not all. In this strange place they're now meant to call home, bones and rocks in deep shadow and blinding light evoke nightmares at all hours. They are, in fact, the omens of a predator that came for them and killed Pepe's father. The incident brought new fences, then regimental meals, and the prison cell shrinks. In the pits of despair, the hippos start fighting. It's the discovery of violence between the dispossessed who can't injure their masters but may hurt each other. 

Anything serves to make the powerless feel powerful. Sometimes, it feels like the only barrier between them and the nothing. This cornucopia of ideas makes Pepe a synecdoche for bigger issues, a post-colonial study that reaches its culmination at the end of the film's first half. This middle point climax comes in a monologue by the ghostly hippo, reflecting on the word "they." The term can be used and weaponized, mean different things in different settings, and maybe even transformed into the dangerous "other." To become an "other" in somebody else's story is to turn into an object, a shadow, a monster. It's tantamount to having one's identity torn from the body. 

These violent descriptions fittingly cut to Christian imagery, and so begins Pepe's second chapter. The implication is ferocious: religion as a tool of colonialism and forced submission. Under the pressure of Christ, old traditions, cultures, belief systems were annihilated. It's also at this point that the film shifts to only nominally concerning Pepe, the hippo. Now, it shall expand and contract, turning into a portrait of those he unwittingly represents. A small community in difficult communion with the natural world are the new protagonists, terrified by rumors of a runaway hippopotamus near their homes. 

The detour into human mundanity breathes some humanism over Pepe, breaking its sense of zoological alienation. It also beckons new idioms into the repertoire of a polyglot picture, including a social realism that's worlds away from the film's more experimental genesis. And just like before, form remains formidable, whether Arias is tracking through the village's nightlife or floating over the water, embodying different perspectives – animal, hunter, some river spirit perhaps – without the disruption of a single cut. Most curiously, some audiovisual strategies that once captured the hippos find themselves repurposed for characters standing upright on two feet.

Such gestures highlight how different cinematic precepts can read depending on the subject. It's a bond between hippo and human but also a line demarcating their essential differences. Gradually, Pepe fades oneiric animalia into a song on the rhythms of rural Colombian life, and Arias adds more lines to the picture. Those connecting or disconnecting species are only ever understood, never shown. But others are displayed, like the lines of a map superimposed over the landscape seen from above. This particular motif repeats and the two images never fit. Their incompatibility shows borders as a human imposition over a land they can't possibly understand. 

Or, going back to a colonial take on Pepe, how imperial forces from outside shaped the wilderness to their whim, cut it into pieces without accounting for the peoples that already lived there, the ecosystems they respected. In its last act, the film shows more maps than ever, accelerating scenery changes. In Medelín, the urban sprawl imposes itself, obscene, and leads to a new register of black-and-white stately compositions that brush abrasively against the viewer. Suddenly, a film full of life feels deadened. In one memorable moment, Arias even frames a Pepe-playing TV in a room decorated with African artifacts and hunting trophies. A perverse joke, a warning.

The sense of tragedy is thick as the spectator is guided to the conclusion of a journey like none other. We got to know Pepe's spirit and what he represents. Now we watch, powerless, as a whole society mobilizes to hunt him down, and a German millionaire pays good money to deliver the killing shot to the beast. And in Pepe's last breath, the spectral speech returns, re-contextualized as a death rattle. The end was the first time they spoke and dreamt – authentic and false, playful and serious, the real deed and the shadow of life, a baroque mixture, opaque, heterogenous, impossible to classify. So ends Pepe, the hippo, and so is Pepe, the film - a masterpiece.

Pepe is in the NYFF Main Slate. At Berlin, it earned Nelson Carlo de Los Santos Arias a well-deserved Silver Bear for Best Director.