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Not A Fever Pace

If you're looking for action, look elsewhere. If you enjoy slow-moving underplayed things, Maya Da-Rin's "The Fever" might work for you. It's an observational film, where you have a fly-on the-wall feeling of peering into a very quiet man and his family. What makes this different is the family and the setting.

The setting is Manaus, Brazil, which sits on the Amazon in the interior of the country. There are two million people living there, so it's a pretty large city, but while the city feel is apparent, particularly on the shipping docks, mostly it has the feeling of being a very rural place. That's because a lot of it takes place in someone's home and their immediate and relatively poor surroundings.

Justino (Regis Myrupu), a man in his 40's or 50's, is a native of the Desana tribe, who works as a security guard at a cargo port, while his daughter, Vanessa (Rosa Peixoto), is about to leave her job as a nurse to go to medical school on a scholarship.

The contrast lies between work and home. At work, he does his job dispassionately. He has to work in order to survive, just like the bulk of the rest of us. He's bored, but there's no action that can be taken to alleviate it. At home, his personality is really no different, but at least he has his daughter, there.

One day, Justino contracts a fever. Around the same time, whenever he is walking near his home, he hears what he thinks is an animal roaming through the rain forest where he lives. The connection remains more of a symbolic mystery than anything else.

Hanging over all of it is the less than overt racism that Brazil's indigenous community faces. Justino's reaction in public is always stoic. In private, he's not exactly animated, but at least he talks about it a bit.

"The Fever" moves at a snail's pace but has a powerful message. The problem is that even saying it has a pace is an exaggeration. It's never quite unbearably boring, but exciting, it ain't.