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‘Pepe’ Review: An Opaque, Experimental Odyssey Through the Afterlife Consciousness of a ‘Cocaine Hippo’
Dominican director Nelson Carlo de los Santos Arias prods at the tale of Pepe the hippo, one of the strangest episodes in recent Colombian history.
Instead, de los Santos Arias sends us on an uncategorizably odd journey down the river of his noodling, needling imagination in a rickety canoe that keeps on capsizing, upended by another sideswiping reference, another jarring change of scene and timeframe or yet another stretch of borderline incomprehensible narration from Pepe himself, a creature who is as surprised as we are that he has suddenly acquired language. Over fuzzy black screens we hear the crackle of walkie-talkie comms between the unit sent to kill “the beast.” And we zigzag back and forth to the Rio Magdalena, to vertiginously high overhead drone shots that peer down to where the differently silty currents meet and a pair of hippos bob langorously, semi-submerged. Candelario has a fractious relationship with his wife Betania (Sor Maria Rios) who after 33 years of marriage has had it with his bullshit, of which his story of being menaced on the river by a huge, malevolent unidentifiable animal is, she believes, only the latest example.
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