Stretched to its ideological limits, Pepe is about the nasty domino effect of colonialism. Dominican filmmaker Nelson Carlos de los Santos Arias uses the strange story of the murdered hippopotamus of the film’s title to tie together themes and ideas around eco-capitalism, the prosecution of Pablo Escobar, the relationship between countries in the global south, European racism, and ecological disaster. But while the film is clearly ambitious, its patchwork approach, a consistently dizzying game of reorientation meant to mirror Pepe’s plight, only winds its way to a point of inconclusiveness that will prove frustrating for most.
The real-life Pepe was one of Colombia’s small collection of hippos, an invasive species introduced to the country by Escobar. The drug empresario started with a small coterie of four, in the late 1970s, but by the time of Pepe’s state-sanctioned killing in 2007, the population had grown to around 90—a genuine threat to indigenous flora and fauna, as well as humans. De los Santos Arias uses Pepe’s murder—the only of its kind in South American history—as a springboard to explore the enduring psychological pain of being ripped from one’s land.
A traditional narrative this is not, but, loosely, Pepe dramatizes the hippo’s extraction from Africa to Colombia to its untimely death. Along the way, the film follows Angel (Nicolás Marín Caly) and Cocorico (Steven Alexander), two Escobar lackeys charged with transporting the animal, and the domestic squabbles of Candelario (Jorge Puntillón Garcia) and his wife, Betania (Sor María Ríos), whose relationship is quickly deteriorating as part of a ripple effect of the hippo’s unwelcome presence in the Magdalena River. Through it all, Pepe literally speaks to us in a demonically timbred voiceover—switching between Afrikaans, Mbukushu, and Spanish—about the story of his life and how he even knows it in the first place.
Between its multiple vignettes and its fractal-like structure, Pepe employs a panoply of disparate technical choices. Some shots of the landscape switch from black and white to color and from film to digital. Mysterious military communiques for clandestine operations are heard in various spots over a white background. Gunfire is re-mixed into a rhythmic cacophony—a sonic and visual dance that recalls early experimentations in animation. Home videos and archival news imagery pepper the first and final acts. And a recurring POV from the eyes of a hippo, on a journey by train through Columbia, harrowingly echoes the experience of Holocaust transport.
Though Pepe seeks to give us an on-the-ground experience of the hippo’s journey, the often exhausting voiceover conceit ensures that it remains stuck in the realm of the academic. The film’s structure is purposely discombobulating in a manner that gives us the feeling that we, too, are trying to establish roots in a foreign land. But every time we’re reminded to think of the film as some kind of puzzle, solvable or not, de los Santos Arias severs the identification link between us and Pepe. And because we never quite know where we are or what’s happening, Pepe’s life comes to feel strangely inconsequential. The film’s digressiveness is such that it makes it hard to glom onto whatever gravitas de los Santos Arias seeks to summon.
As an anguished cry against colonialism, Pepe works best when illustrating the micro ways in which culture is erased by capital interests. In an especially astute way, it demonstrates how even knowledge and intellectualism can be colonial invaders, though it’s a shame that this demonstration comes at the expense of the film itself striking an overly intellectual pose.
Still, the presence of the critique is incisive. As Pepe himself wonders aloud at one point, why does he know the things that he knows? Why should a hippo know these European tongues? In an early scene, a South African man named Shili explains in Afrikaans to a group of German tourists that the hippo is seen among his tribe as a wise and ancient being, formerly human, and able to warn us of bad things. But when the tour guide translates Shili’s words into German, the white audience laughs at what they perceive as primitive ignorance. In this small scene, Pepe suggests that while power is profiting from the powerless, it also shirks any responsibility over what it’s bought, allowing the hippo to die once it no longer has value as entertainment.
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