Guiana impressions [#1]

As our daughter Rachel has started her (five year) medical residency with a semester round in a French Guiana hospital, we took the opportunity of the Xmas break and of acceptable travel restrictions to visit her and the largest (and sole American) French departement for a week! This was a most unexpected trip that we enjoyed considerably.

While hot and humid is not my favourite type of weather (!) the weather remained quite tolerable that week, esp. when considering this was the start of the rain season (guiana means land of plentiful water in Arawak!) This made hiking on the (well-traced) paths in the local equatorial rain forest rather interesting, as the red soil is definitely muddy or worse. I however faced much less insects than I feared and mosquito bites were rare beyond the dawn and dusk periods. Plenty of birds, albeit mostly invisible. Except for the fantastic marshes of Kaw, where the variety of birds is amazing, including aras and toucans. Very muddy trails, did I mention it, but beautiful explosion of trees. Green everywhere.My first sight of a sloth was quite the treat, but I regret not spotting anteaters. Or a tapir. Swimming in the marshes of Kaw was great as well, with no worry from local caimans! Which we went spotting after nightfall. The place reminded me in several ways of Tonlé Sap lake, near Angkor.

Ate there an atipa bosco fish from the same place. Which has samurai armor. And two front legs to move outside water! As we had no say in what was served, we also ate paca meat in this restaurant, the agouti paca being a local rodent. Unfortunately because bush meat should not be served to tourists for fear of reducing the animal populations.

Visited several remains of former penal colonies, the whole country being a French penal colony at a not-so-distant-time, from the era when Louisiana was sold to the U.S. to the abolition in 1938, only implemented in 1953… Appalling to think that political and criminal prisoners were sent there to slowly rot to death, with no economical purpose on top of it! To the point of dead prisoners being immersed at sea rather than buried on island gallows, the local cemetery being reserved to guardians and their families….

a ghastly ghost

My daughter sort of dragged me to watch The Revenant as it just came out in French cinemas and I reluctantly agreed as I had read about magnificent winter and mountain sceneries, shot in an unusually wide format with real light. And indeed the landscape and background of the entire movie are magnificent, mostly shot in the Canadian Rockies, around Kananaskis and Canmore, which is on the way to Banff. (Plus a bit in Squamish rain forest.) The story is however quite a disappointment as it piles up one suspension of disbelief after another. This is a tale of survival (as I presume everyone knows!) but so implausible as to cancel any appreciation of the film. It may be the director Iñárritu is more interested in a sort of new age symbolism than realism, since there are many oniric passages with floating characters and falling meteors, desecrated churches and pyramids of bones, while the soundtrack often brings in surreal sounds, but the impossible survival of Hugh Glass made me focus more and more on the scenery… While the true Hugh Glass did manage to survive on his own, fixing his broken leg, scrawling to a river, and making a raft that brought him to a fort downstream, [warning, potential spoilers ahead!] the central character in the movie takes it to a fantasy level as he escapes hypothermia while swimming in freezing rapids, drowning while wearing a brand new bearskin, toxocariasis while eating raw liver,  bullets when fleeing from both Araka Indians and French (from France, Louisiana, or Québec???) trappers, a 30 meter fall from a cliff with not enough snow at the bottom to make a dent on, subzero temperatures while sleeping inside a horse carcass [and getting out of it next morning when it should be frozen solid], massive festering bone-deep wounds, and the deadly Midwestern winter… Not to mention the ability of make fire out of nothing in the worst possible weather conditions or to fire arrows killing men on the spot or to keep a never ending reserve of bullets. And while I am at it, the ability to understand others: I had trouble even with the French speaking characters, despite their rather modern French accent!

True Detective [review]

Even though I wrote before that I do not watch TV series, I made a second exception this year with True Detective. This series was recommended to me by Judith and this was truly a good recommendation!

Contrary to my old-fashioned idea of TV series, where the same group of caricaturesque characters repeatedly meet new settings that are solved within the 50 mn each show lasts, the whole season of True Detective is a single story, much more like a very long movie with a unified plot that smoothly unfolds and gets mostly solved in the last episode. It obviously brings more strength and depth in the characters, the two investigators Rust and Marty, with the side drawback that most of the other characters, except maybe Marty’s wife, get little space.  The opposition between those two investigators is central to the coherence of the story, with Rust being the most intriguing one, very intellectual, almost otherworldly, with a nihilistic discourse, and a self-destructive bent, while Marty sounds more down-to-earth, although he also caters to his own self-destructive demons… Both actors are very impressive in giving a life and an history to their characters. The story takes place in Louisiana, with great landscapes and oppressive swamps where everything seems doomed to vanish, eventually, making detective work almost useless. And where clamminess applies to moral values as much as to the weather. The core of the plot is the search for a serial killer, whose murders of women are incorporated within a pagan cult. Although this sounds rather standard for a US murder story (!), and while there are unnecessary sub-plots and unconvincing developments, the overall storyboard is quite coherent, with a literary feel, even though its writer,  Nic Pizzolatto, never completed the corresponding novel and the unfolding of the plot is anything but conventional, with well-done flashbacks and multi-layered takes on the same events. (With none of the subtlety of Rashômon, where one ends up mistrusting every POV.)  Most of the series takes place in current time, when the two former detectives are interrogated by detectives reopening an unsolved murder case. The transformation of Rust over 15 years is an impressive piece of acting, worth by itself watching the show! The final episode, while impressive from an aesthetic perspective as a descent into darkness, is somewhat disappointing at the story level for not exploring the killer’s perspective much further and for resorting to a fairly conventional (in the Psycho sense!) fighting scene.