The Blue Trail review – a winding and creative dystopian drama

“Taking care of our elderly is not a choice, it’s a patriotic duty,” an ominous voice from the sky declares in the opening moments of Gabriel Mascaro’s The Blue Trail. Listening carefully is 77-year-old Tereza (the veteran Brazilian actor Denise Weinberg), whose disgruntled expression only deepens when a gold-plated laurel is placed to frame her door to let passers-by know she is approaching ​“that age”. When a person turns 80, a government mandate orders that they be loaded like garbage bags onto the ​“wrinkle wagon” and transported to a senior citizen colony, removed from everyday society to unburden the younger generation. 

It’s a looming threat to Tereza, but when she’s summoned to meet with her boss, who delivers the blow that the mandatory age has lowered to 75, she is forced into retirement and placed under the total guardianship of her daughter, Joana (Clarissa Pinheiro). Tereza isn’t willing to be shackled to dependency and so she flees, embarking on a voyage of later-life escapism and resistance.

Cinematographer Guillermo Garza packs this fantastical odyssey with imaginative landscapes, from shots of a riverbank packed with rubber tyres to a lonely boat chugging through twisting rivers. Though the frame is boxy, the landscapes appear expansive, as if trying to break free from the screen’s boundaries. Likewise, Tereza sets sail as a stowaway on Cadu’s (Rodrigo Santoro) boat, performing a personal mutiny as she floats on the winding Amazonian rivers in search of personal freedom.

Along the way, she meets fellow free spirit The Nun (Miriam Socarrás), a woman who sees Tereza for who she is. Weinberg and Socarrás’ chemistry is instantly familiar – they forge a tender utopia that creates a craving that this pairing had arrived earlier and lasted longer. When it comes to ageing bodies in this dystopian ageist authoritarianism, Mascaro’s social critique flits between visual absurdity and stark grounding. Though narratively upfront, the exploration of ageism is particularly enlightening for its forward-looking direction, without a sentimentally reflective air. The here and now is paramount in The Blue Trail, not who Tereza was, but who she can be. Such is a rarity in narratives of older women.

Also embedded within The Blue Trail is a venture into magical realism. While on Cadu’s boat, Tereza witnesses the power of blue drool excreted by rare snails that offer the power to see the future. It sets up an interesting premise that is abandoned until the waning moments of the film’s curt runtime. Like other revelations, including Tereza’s discovery that you can buy your freedom from the colony, these ideas go underexplored as the film’s ambitious plot becomes tenuous. Yet the real magic of this film is Weinberg’s punctilious performance.