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d. John Boorman; pr. John Boorman, Michael Dryhurst; scr. Rospo Pallenberg; ph. Philippe Rousselot; m. Brian Gascoyne, Junior Homrich; ed. Ian Carfford; cast. Powers Boothe, Meg Foster, Charley Boorman, Yara Vaneau, William Rodriguez, Dira Paes (114 mins)

EMERALD FOREST FACTS: PROMOTION - despite the film's weighty environmental themes, for promotion in the USA, the marketers tried to pitch it a different way, stressing that it was "The adventure movie of the year." (read more); FILM TALES - Outsiders star C. Thomas Howell was originally sought for the role of the boy kidnapped by Indians, but when Howell proved unavailable, director Boorman decided to cast his own son Charley in the role, a decision that later led to accusations of nepotism; SPONSOR DETAILS: This review ofThe Emerald Forest is sponsored by Inkstone Digital - the latest ebooks for as low as $8.95 with new titles added weekly (read more); Scrolling News Ticker by Mioplanet;

Supposedly based on a true story, John Boorman’s film of The Emerald Forest adopts as a dramatization principle a kind of mystical environmental anthropology.

It is not enough for the arguably great director to examine a “primitive” culture as he must make a statement about the destructive sweep of so-called “civilization”. Of course, this clash between the primitive and the civilized is a driving concept behind much anthropological fiction as is the notion of a transplanted individual forced to adapt to an “other” culture often at the demise of their sense of inherent superiority. Although these themes are present in Boorman’s work, he uses it for more mystical ends, a romantic evocation of the primitive as innocent – making the film reside at the forefront of the burgeoning environmental movement which had begun its timely focus on the increasing destruction of the Amazon rain forests and thus their native inhabitants. In an era of increased pollution there was much outrage at the destruction of this natural, essential wonder and perhaps Boorman intended his film as a call for change, a depiction of the pure beauty of what is being lost in the progress of human civilization with its dams, roads and logging operations. It also allowed the director to return to the theme of man and nature from his earlier Deliverance and the opportunity to put forward one of the harshest condemnations of cultural Imperialism to emerge from the decade.

Powers Boothe plays an American engineer who comes with his wife (Meg Foster) and their two young children to Brazil in order to build a massive dam on the Amazon.

He takes his family to the building site near the jungle where his young son says that he sees people. Boothe humors the boy but scant moments later he realizes that his son has been kidnapped. He searches in vain. Some ten years pass and Boothe balances his work with his obsessive hunt for his son, whom we learn has grown into a strapping young man (Charley Boorman) fully accepted by the tribe he now considers his people. On one such trip down the interior of the Amazon, Boothe learns of the “invisible people” and seeks to contact them. Instead, he finds a warrior tribe who intend to hunt him down and kill him for their sport. He flees, but is wounded. However, he soon comes face to face with his son on a quest of significance to his people. Boothe is led back to the safety of the tribe but wants his son to return home: the son cannot and Boothe must now deal with a complex sense of loss. Soon after Boothe returns to his world, the son’s tribe is attacked by the “fierce people” and their women kidnapped to be sold into prostitution. Now the son must leave the jungle and enter into the urban nightmare to ask for his father’s help and Boothe must thus weigh his professional obligations against his newfound sense of righteousness.

The Emerald Forest is an undoubtedly beautiful film perhaps more calculated for affect than arguably authentic as an anthropological study although it constantly serves to explore the extent to which the aesthetics of anthropological veracity can enhance an environmental message: it is never objective, nor need it be.

Yet it is fascinated with the customs and rituals of the “primitive” people and in the process thus considers them Innocents, whose world will undoubtedly be shattered by the civilization that represents Experience. Boorman is in no doubt about what Experience brings – guns, plunder and sexual exploitation: the awful moral anarchy and ugliness that exists in the film as the representation of progress. The so-called primitive live in harmony with nature although the “fierce people” make the good and bad distinction between tribes an arguable simplification to qualify the innocent world – what is important is that the fierce people have been deposed from their homes and their savagery has been exploited: the taint of Experience only worsens and unbalances the delicate natural order in this world. In its application of environmental and anthropological dilemmas to the ageless struggle between Innocence and Experience, Boorman has made a captivating and haunting film of continued resonance. Although it stops short of the intensity he brought to the survivalist triumph Deliverance, it is a worthy effort.

Whilst much of the film’s first half concerns the son’s existence as an equal within the tribe, perfectly at home and accepting of such, the ultimate moral dilemma of the film rests with Boothe as father.

What is intriguingly established from the outset is the suggestion that his son has been taken as retribution for his role in the destruction of nature. His punishment is thus a lesson in a kind of environmental and anthropological humility. He cannot bear to have his son taken away from him (and, by implication, from the civilization he represents) and thus would seek to save the son from a world in which he does not belong. What Boothe soon discovers is that his son is happy there and indeed more than that has retained far more of his innocence than would otherwise be possible. Boothe’s epiphany is that his son belongs in this world and finally thus that this world and life is one that he should work to preserve rather than destroy. He not only has to redefine love but is forced to confront the savagery that rests in what he once represented: the repugnant, violent sexual exploitation of Eden. His cultural sensibilities inverted, he now seeks to restore what he once sought unthinkingly to destroy. Nature’s retribution is not to take from him his beloved son but to show to him a beauty lost to him. Boorman seeks to imply this appreciation is an awareness lost to western humanity and wants to restore it in what amounts to an environmentalist myth.

Nevertheless, the transfer preserves Boorman’s points – the sense of natural beauty and wonder, the mythic and mystical jungle Eden, and the ugliness of civilization – and in its depiction of the waterside society at the outskirts of the city reveals the fate of poverty and despair that awaits those removed from the jungle and forced to adapt to the imposed civilization. Thus, the notion of shrinking boundaries between these worlds is frequently developed. The scenes of bulldozers destroying nature and the river quest motif recall the survivalist themes of Boorman’s American classic Deliverance as well as evoking the films of Werner Herzog. Locations are exquisite, the camera capturing the beauty of the sun streaming into the forest as light transforms into natural shadows amongst the vibrant greens. A stress on the elements underlies the film – the balance of civilization perhaps – and firelight sequences are bathed in an orange glow. The natural grandeur is ravishing in a film full of astonishing scenes and stunning camerawork as the hallucinatory aspects underlying the native mysticism wholly absent from civilized Experience. Aptly, the scene of the son leaving the forest down the road to civilization has the symbolic power of a descent into Hell as flames line the roadside.

Sound
The sound transfer is an engrossing Dolby Digital stereo surround, bringing out the variety of jungle noises for an immersive experience as the natural order is frequently contrasted to the imposition of civilization with its roaring trucks and monstrous bulldozers. Audio levels are delicately mixed and there are moments of almost pristine solitude, although absolute silence is an almost unnatural serenity amidst the diegetic sounds of nature at its purest. Of course, the difference between civilized and natural “order” is a motif in a film which celebrates the joy in communal interaction amongst the “invisible people”. Isolated sounds have a fine spatial dimension – the riverboat traveling, rain on leaves, a waterfall – and there is also a sense of the exotic to the sound mix although Boorman always returns to the threat posed to this well-established natural order. The score uses native instruments to unusual affect, with the use of drums being a particular standout. The music over the end credits makes for an unusual hybrid of the primitive and the modern, perhaps suggestive of the unity possible (and which Boothe may have attained through his final actions now that, as the end reveals, he is aware of what has been lost in the course of civilization). It is an unusual experience, with the aural design in the end also revealing for Boothe the mystical qualities so important now to his son: thus, sound design reveals their shared bond.

Alas, the only special feature is a trailer. Boorman has written of the making of this film extensively in published accounts and some extracts from these at least would have been most welcome.