Films from Sunset Boulevard to The Sixth Sense have pivoted on the revelation that the protagonist was dead all along. Pepe, the sometime narrator of Nelson Carlo de los Santos Arias’s strikingly odd winner of the Silver Bear at Berlin’s film festival, is upfront about his corporeal status.
Speaking in a mix of Spanish, Afrikaans and the Namibian dialect Mbukushu between his sardonic guffawing, the late, titular narrator of Pepe is a dead hippopotamus. “I am dead,” he explains. “Where are my antenna ears?”
In real life, Pepe was part of a herd of hippos the Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar kept in a private menagerie at his residence in Hacienda Nápoles. When Escobar was killed, in 1993, the fast-breeding animals began roaming around the river Magdalena. Expelled following a challenge to the alpha hippopotamus, the marauding Pepe was doomed to wander alone, terrifying locals along the way, and inspiring tall tales.
In common with the ghostly voiceover of Mati Diop’s Dahomey, Pepe cannot understand his death, nor can he explain his capacity for language: “How do I know these words? How do I know what a word is?”
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The Dominican film-maker takes an uncompromising, scattershot approach to his subject. The hippo’s meditations are punctuated with miniature human dramas. The film opens with radio communications as the military prepare for a kill order. A busload of West Germans are visiting Namibia, Pepe’s ancestral home, for a hippo safari in the 1970s; in a colonial aside, they are warned about being too kind to the locals. The wife of a Colombian fisherman accuses him of cheating when he claims that a strange giant animal delayed his homecoming. (She’s right, as it happens.)
Fans of the playful meandering of the Romanian auteur Radu Jude will likely enjoy the haphazard storytelling and epic travelling shots. But the cumulative effect of the speculative fantasy and hybrid presentation is profoundly sad, as a voiceless victim of the drug cartels meets a terrible fate in a strange land.
Pepe is available on Mubi
