Can We Really Go Back: Our Review of ‘Pepe’ on MUBI

Posted in What's Streaming? by - January 12, 2025
Can We Really Go Back: Our Review of ‘Pepe’ on MUBI

The forests of Namibia are teeming with life, seeming eternal despite the interruptions of a helicopter on the hunt. Eventually, the helicopter finds what it’s looking for – hippos that, in this case, roam one of Pablo Escobar’s haciendas. Pepe depicts the life of one of those hippos through different ways from birth to adulthood. The film gives him two interchanging voices, as he speaks in ‘native’ Afrikaans and Spanish and back again. There’s also a lot of back and forth visually, with regular shots that one sees in nature documentaries that it mixes up with some 16mm footage.

Pepe shows the differences between Pepe’s Afrikaans identity (Fareed Matjila) and his Spanish one (Jhon Narváez). Sometimes, director Nelson Carlos de los Santos Arias observes Pepe in silence, a state that won’t last long. Candelario (Jorge Puntillón García), one of the locals, runs into him, a brief encounter that nobody believes. His biggest skeptic is his partner, Betania (Sor María Ríos), which makes him want to gather a hunting party. That doesn’t mean, though, that the locals aren’t violent, as the film also shows a peace that Pepe may be interrupting.

A lot of the film touches on esoteric recent history, or spaces within events that some already probably forgot. This probably explains all the quiet moments, maybe a little too quiet that the film may just indulge on. Pepe, thus has the same flaws that come as part of a dime a dozen films with a metaphor. There’s a lot of Pepe mostly hanging around, almost eschewing the voiceover gimmick that made the first half interesting. There’s also the scenes with dialogue that it captures from a distance, a technique familiar to experimental film fans.

Pepe, in telling Pablo Escobar’s hippo’s story, bills itself as a film exposing colonialism in its various manifestations. There’s the original colonialism during the Namibia scenes and the contemporary, drug war version of colonialism. The film’s central conceit may lead to a lose lose situation as it uses Pepe as its ‘in’. Showing the by-products of colonialism makes the film ripe for misinterpretation, but that may be a perspective problem I need to fix. Fixing that may involve a switch of the kinds of characters it shows but doing so makes it digress from its take on the themes that it chose.

Another way of looking at Pepe‘s switches is that there are rewards in observing the distinct communities around Pepe. I particularly like the pageant scene where the contestants answer pageant-y questions about their solutions to community problems. The scene is obvious in good ways in highlighting the societies in which Pepe’s presence is an inadvertent disruption. Waves of descendants of enslaved people eventually encounter the natural forces that it left behind, not by choice obviously. The implications of these juxtapositions may not sit well with everyone but at least it’s within a challenging film.

Pepe is available on Mubi.

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While Paolo Kagaoan is not taking long walks in shrubbed areas, he occasionally watches movies and write about them. His credentials are as follows: he has a double major in English and Art History. This means that, for example, he will gush at the art direction in the Amityville house and will want to live there, which is a terrible idea because that house has ghosts. Follow him @paolokagaoan on Instagram but not while you're working.
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