New York Film Festival 2024

[Chris Knipp]

PEPE THE HIPPO IN PEPE

NELSON CARLOS DE LOS SANTOS ARIAS: PEPE (2024)

Dying thoughts of Pablo Escobar's escaped Hippopotamus

Writer/director/editor/composer Nelson Carlos de los Santos Arias has many ideas flying around in his head when he unreels this high-concept film, which takes the idea of the banished Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar's dispersed ménage of exotic African animals and in particular, one hippo who escaped from the herd and was shot down. Coming from Namibia, Southwest Africa, one of four, to South America and then, like an escaped slave hunted down: this seemed to Carlos de los Santos Arias too good an idea not to run with it with ideas of colonialism and eco-tourism dancing in his head.

But his symbolic protagonist cannot not run too far, because "Pepe", a name the locals gave the unfortunate beast, is dead when the film begins. We see him, but the deep voice we hear is his disembodied post mortem spirit, pondering. The part that appealed to me was the voice. There are several. Jhon Narváez, Matjila Fareed, Harmony Ahalwa, and Shifafure Faustinus voice Pepe in Spanish, Afrikaans, and Mbukushu, successively, but the sequence begins in an indigenous dialect. This is meant to reflect alternate colonized people and the capturing of a hippopotamus "herd" (or was it more like a posse?) made Pepe a colonized animal person.

Among these voices there was a very deep one that maybe was speaking in Mbukushu, which has an archaic ring to it, but the Afrikaans, I guess, sounds good too. Unfortunately the filmmakers did not think to indicate in their subtitling which language was being subtitled.

A similar playing-around took place with this film in the images, because they are rendered alternately between Super 16mm film-stock, digital RED cameras, and night-vision surveillance footage. I'm indebted to POV Magazine's article about the film, which adds that "The wide array of formats and aspect ratios are interwoven within the languid chronology."

Languid chronology. Hmmm. Well, I fell asleep, but then, I was tired. I was wide awake when there was careful coverage of a provincial fair in which very local, very naive and well-meaning "beauty queens" came forward and expressed their halting plans for improving the local region, to wild applause by their mothers. Whatever this had to do with the spirit of an escaped former captive, then liberated hippo was a question lost in the languid chronology.

Another format came from the director's rather small square showing what POV somewhat laboriously explains by saing that "The implementation of a fictional Hanna-Barbera inspired cartoon also comments on the mythologization of the hippopotami phenomenon." So there's that.

That chronology also warped into a small tour bus, apparently in Namibia, or South Africa (who knows?) where a guide was addressing the group in German about sight-seeing local wildlife and how to deal with the local "natives" (be friendly but keep a distance), referring to his black local guide, also present, who addressed him ending each sentence with "Boss." Hmmm, and again hmmm. At the end my screening companion's comment was "I don't know what I've just seen." Nor did I. But I liked the deep archaic hippo voice, regardless of anything it uttered.

Jessica Kiang in her Variety review calls this film "a sometimes fascinating but more often frustrating head-trip." The review heading also calls the film "An Opaque, Experimental Odyssey." It's opaque for us because it stays stuck inside the filmmaker's head.

Pepe, mins., debuted at the Berlinale Feb. 20, 2024, showing also at Beijing, Hong Kong, IndieLisboa, Shanghai, Sydney, Karlovy Vary, Poland, Torontok, BFI London, and the NYFF, where it was screened for this review. Metacritic rating: 59%.