In This Brazilian Dystopia, An Elderly Woman Fights For Her Freedom
Writer-director Gabriel Mascaro reveals the real-life inspirations behind The Blue Trail.
You don’t want to ride the Wrinkle Wagon. That’s the vehicle that transports elderly people out of town when they are forced into exile in the realist dystopia of The Blue Trail.
In the new film from Brazilian writer-director Gabriel Mascaro, the autocratic government has decided that in order to improve productivity, they must remove the elderly from everyday life so that younger individuals no longer have to care for them. “It’s not a movie about a gadget or technology that disrupts the present,” Mascaro tells Inverse. “It’s about a cultural change that normalizes elderly people being arrested and taken to a senior colony.”
77-year-old Tereza (Denise Weinberg), who works at an alligator meat processing facility, believes she still has three years to go — only those 80 and older are taken. But when the age limit is lowered to 75, her days of freedom are numbered. Now under the custody of her adult daughter, Tereza isn’t allowed to buy a plane ticket (her dream is to fly at least once in her life) or even ride a long-distance bus without her guardian’s permission.
These restrictions on her agency, during her last days before being moved to an elderly colony, push Tereza to defy the authorities. She embarks on a rogue journey through the Amazon, at first to live out her final wish and eventually to embrace that she’s still alive.
Mascaro was initially intrigued by the lack of elderly protagonists in films, especially in genre narratives. In those cases where a character of a certain age is in the lead, he says, the conflict often revolves around a terminal illness or a feeling of nostalgia for the past. Those characters are rarely portrayed as still having a future or a chance to change who they are.
“Genre films are associated with young bodies: coming-of-age stories, dystopias, and road movies,” Mascaro says. “That’s why I deliberately decided to make a movie to play with genre conventions that often don’t allow for an elderly body to be the protagonist. Why can’t elderly people rebel against the system? Why can’t elderly people have a rite of passage that is not death? Why can’t elderly bodies experience something new?”
For Mascaro, The Blue Trail blossomed from a personal seed, a close example of the story’s key theme: A person can continue to grow and reinvent themselves no matter their age. “I was really inspired by how my grandmother started painting when she was 80 years old, just after my grandfather passed away,” he explains. “It was very inspiring to see her discovering new meaning for her life.” Mascaro’s grandmother, now 95, has seen the film.
“There was a big scare about her missing the movie if she died before the release, so I asked her if she wanted to watch the movie on a computer, and she said, ‘No, I want to see it in the cinema,’” he recalls. “She saw it on the big screen when the movie was released in Brazil.”
Gabriel Mascaro on the set of The Blue Trail.
While Mascaro believes older audiences might find specific instances in the film humorous or harrowing, he hopes young viewers can reconsider how they see the elderly. “To see someone in her 70s experiencing the blue slime snail [whose brightly colored secretion has psychotropic effects that let the characters see the future when poured over one’s eyes] or having her first massage session or having this amazing encounter with a new friend dancing and pulsating can be powerful,” he adds.
In The Blue Trail, the insidiousness of the government’s policies manifests not through overt violence but in how those in power have managed to persuade the citizens to police one another under the guise that the rules benefit everyone. Wherever Tereza goes, someone asks her for her documents so that they can confirm her age, even as she tries to buy food.
“Everyone is surveilling each other, and for me that makes the autocracy feel more powerful than having an official government army with big guns,” Mascaro explains. The situations in the film feel so anchored to reality that some viewers can’t tell they are fictional. “It’s so interesting because people sometimes ask me in different countries, ‘Is this really happening in Brazil?’ And that’s so amazing because the movie has this absurdist, humorous tone. But people still can find in their heart that it really could happen.”
The violence also manifests in how the state takes control over people’s bodies in a literal manner. At one point, Tereza and other elderly people about to be shipped off to the colony are forced to wear diapers, even if they physically don’t need to. On top of that, a government employee must invasively check that they have put it on correctly.
“When I was researching, a lot of elderly people told me, ‘When you start wearing diapers you lose your privacy,’” he recalls, referring to how caretakers ultimately make all the decisions. Elderly people are often denied the right to consent. “It’s such a strong feeling of violation for someone to do this to your body.”
The Blue Trail based its dystopia on real-life hurdles for the elderly.
In Mascaro’s previous film Divine Love, a similar bodily boundary is crossed. When a woman enters a building in that futuristic narrative, where evangelical Christianity dominates all aspects of Brazilian life, a high-tech door reveals if she is pregnant, as well as her marital status. In The Blue Trail, evangelical Christianity appears in the form of digital Bibles (depicted as translucid tablets) that Roberta (Miriam Socarrás), another elderly woman who doesn’t actually believe in God, travels around selling on her boat.
“There are a lot of boats in the Amazon region that try to convert Indigenous people to evangelical Christianity,” Mascaro says about the real-life inspiration for this aspect of the film. “These big boats become like floating churches.”
Mascaro focused on an elderly character in The Blue Trail, but the dystopia on screen is not too distant from the many instances of forced displacement taking place around the world “because of wars, poverty, and environmental catastrophes that force immigration,” he says. Since getting older is a universal experience, perhaps Tereza’s story can make audiences reflect about the millions of people in her situation for a myriad of reasons.
“In this movie I try to generate empathy through the elderly. We are not talking about a Palestinian or a Latin American immigrant in the U.S. We’re talking about elderly people. Being old is a huge transgression in this world,” Mascaro said. “Hopefully this example can also bring us back to feel empathy for others who are also being displaced.”
