Maya Da-Rin’s The Fever takes place in Manaus, Brazil, where a particularly virulent and contagious mutation of Covid-19 first took hold, though the film was shot well before the virus dominated the city. The film looks at other life-changing forces with acute impacts on life in a city located at the confluence of the Rio Negro and Amazon Rivers: industrialization and globalization, as experienced by a middle-aged indigenous man named Justino (Regis Myrupu). In The Fever, Manaus is a place of irreconcilable tension between the lush natural world and the cold, metallic world of industrial modernity.
Da-Rin represents the latter through images of the harbor where Justino works as a security guard, stoically standing in various spots around monstrous shipping containers. While the film rarely matches its perspective precisely to his point of view, it adopts his outward impassivity, casting neutral glances upward at cranes as they move the giant metal crates through the air, staring at the sterile arrangement of inorganic rectangles bearing the names of faraway places. This environment is set in opposition to the life that Justino lives on the margins of Manaus, which possesses an order much less beholden to the impersonal rationality of work at the harbor, his region’s point of interface with the global market.
A disruption that crosses between the physical world and Justino’s inner life is augured by several ambiguous signs. A crack has appeared in the wall of the home he shares with his daughter, Vanessa (Rosa Peixoto), who’s just been offered a scholarship to study medicine at the far-off University of Brasilia. He also hears rustling in the leaves next to the highway where the bus drops him off everyday. Elsewhere, news programs blaring on televisions propped outside of the market stalls he passes on his journey home report of mysterious animal attacks nearby. And he develops a mysterious fever and has a strange dream about being chased in the forest. Da-Rin lets these foreboding occurrences accumulate throughout the film, neither offering much conventional guidance on how to read them, nor coloring them as elements of suspense, and so the audience anticipates some kind of explanatory revelation.
Justino doesn’t seem surprised by the fever, or challenged by the idea that it might be related to both the crack in the wall and the wild animal on the loose. Likewise, the film doesn’t straightforwardly delineate possibly imagined sensations—particularly the sounds that Justino hears from the jungle—from real ones. There’s a distanced realism to the presentation, a crispness to the background noises and simplicity to Da-Rin’s staging, that at times can seem paradoxically oneiric. In its more abstract stretches, like those set at the harbor, The Fever turns unaltered slices of reality into a waking dream, a realm between states of consciousness—reflecting the way that Justino feels increasingly caught between worlds.
While in Justino’s quiet demeanor the film might be seen as veering close to indulging the stereotype of the stoic, silent indigenous person, Da-Rin’s approach to the story, inflected by collaboration from the indigenous actors in the main roles, Myrupu and Peixoto, defies tired representational means of humanizing oppressed natives through eliciting the universal values of the “family of man.” The Fever emphasizes that the disappearing world of Justino and Vanessa’s forbears gave rise to a distinct and valid perception of reality, in which perception, the body, and dreams are entangled with one another.
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