By Dimitri Keramitas
One of the strangest cases of invasive species appeared a number of years ago in Colombia. The notorious narco lord Pablo Escobar - a man worth billions - decided to create a private animal sanctuary and imported, among other fauna, a number of hippopotami. The sanctuary went to seed after Escobar was killed by law enforcement officers, but the hippos remained - and multiplied, disturbing the environment.
Pépé, a film by Nelson Carlo de Los Santos Arias - winner of the Golden Bear for Best Direction at 2024’s Berlinale - recounts the story of one such hippo as a surreal fable. The movie resembles certain films of Werner Herzog, with its combination of documentary footage and metaphysical fiction, but the director isn’t always in control of his form. Neither is he always in control of his metaphysics.
The story of Pépé begins in Namibia, southern Africa. We follow a group of German tourists being bused into the wild to see the animals, led by a German (or perhaps Afrikaner) guide. There’s amusing satire in the discrepancy between the guide’s account of hippos’ ways and the “superstitions” of his African assistant.
The shots of the landscape are powerful, but even more so is the depiction of the hippopotamus. We all have a cartoon image of a goofy animal (like the TV images of a cartoon hippo the filmmaker sometimes shows us), as opposed to the rhino with the pointy horn and the elephant with his tusks. But the hippo is also an intimidating beast with a massive size and thick leathery hide.
In fact, the hippo is one of the wild’s most dangerous animals when riled. It can charge at high speed, and though it likes to lounge in the water, it can also move there with great rapidity. We don’t see precisely how Pépé was captured, but there are darkly comical scenes of two flunkies transporting it through the Colombian hinterlands in a rickety truck (they don’t really know what their cargo is). The animal almost causes the truck to tumble over, but the men manage to bring it to its watery destination.
The scenes of Pépé, first in Africa, then in Colombia, are strikingly vivid, and sometimes verge on a mystical vision of nature, the images saturated with colour.
The hippo seems like a waterlogged tree in the river, a living boulder on land. Its nature is utterly inscrutable, at least until it goes into action against anyone disturbing its space. An exception are the birds that hop onto its hide to peck at the insects which are an irritation for him but sustenance for them.
The nature footage, whether of Pépé or the environment enveloping him, are the best parts of the film. The voice-over purporting to express the hippo’s thoughts seems, with a few exceptions, too philosophical and, especially, anthropocentric. It doesn’t help that sometimes the voice-over is in Spanish, sometimes in another language. The noises that the hippo makes on occasion (which appear to be the filmmaker’s invention) are more expressive of his elemental strangeness.
For the viewer, the Colombian landscape seems just as “natural” as that of southern Africa, and even more tropical. However, they are of course not the same, and the difference acts upon the nature of the hippos. Animals that lived together in natural harmony begin to have conflicts, and after a falling-out with one dominant hippo, Pépé migrates to a different area.
The film recalls Robert Bresson’s great work Au Hasard Balthazar, which was about an errant donkey. That particular animal was an obvious Christian symbol, accentuated by its encounters with a gallery of mostly negative characters and a tragic end. The human characters in Pépé are also mostly nasty or stupid, but the hippo’s own character isn’t pressed through an overtly Christian cookie-cutter. Pépé is an Other, whose strangeness is intended to be unknowable. In the film’s vision of naturalistic alienation we are all Others, subsumed to elemental violence, yet even on this level, the film could have done with more dramatization.
It’s when Pépé approaches a remote river village that the film comes to life. Candelario (Jorge Puntillon Garcia), an elderly villager, encounters the hippo on the river, and this changes his life in a strange way. It results in a breakdown of relations with his wife (an irascible type to begin with). As other villagers experience close encounters with the hippo, they come into conflict with the Inspector in charge of local order. He rejects their repeated solicitations, which frays the social fabric.
Some surreal touches take the film’s naturalism into odd directions. Candelario leaves behind his fellow villagers, and his wife, to row his boat in the vicinity of the hippo. He knows it’s dangerous, but something attracts him. A different attraction principle attaches to a beauty contest featuring young village women who give the judges accounts of their exalted ambitions (one wants to become a scientist, another a journalist). The contest culminates in the women floating down the river on gaudily flower-laden rafts. They aren’t harmed by the huge animal in the river, so there does seem to be something beyond “nature red in tooth and claw”.
The initial footage of Pépé and the dramatic scenes are the most effective parts of the film. The arty bits - the recurrent motif of soldiers on an operation, TV cartoon shots, occasional screen black-outs, the voice-overs - drive home the fact that the director isn’t a conventional hack of a filmmaker. Arias, who’s from the Dominican Republic, has a background in experimental film and studied in Mexico City, Buenos Aires, Edinburgh, and Los Angeles. Still, these techniques are distractions, venal sins committed by a filmmaker who hasn’t fully digested his technique, or his content.
That content includes social and political context. Arias’ treatment of Colombian reality can be seen as a series of deft touches: the absurdity of the men transporting Pépé, the village Inspector, the beauty contest. They bring to mind the Colombia of Garcia Marquez (the film as a whole is like a Marquezian fable). However, the civil war between the government and FARC guerrillas, the bloody reign of the narco lords, America’s DEA interventionism, seem to have been extracted from the film’s universe like a painful molar. Even the killing of Escobar is presented as something of a natural occurrence, devoid of context.
Pépé is an ambitious Dominican-French-German-Namibian co-production. Likewise, no less than four actors of different nationalities took turns voicing the hippo’s thoughts. But while the film succeeds in attaining complexity, it’s at the expense of its Colombian core.
Despite its flaws, the brilliant sequences redeem Pépé as a film, however. And as a fable it powerfully depicts the consequences of the disturbances currently being visited upon nature. The creatures displaced by these disturbances can be as small as birds (carrying a virus) or as large as a hippo, but the ultimate blame doesn’t lie with them. To paraphrase cartoonist Walt Kelly’s Pogo, “We have met the invasive species, and he is us.”
Pépé hits French theatre screens in January 2025. Photos courtesy of the film distributors.
