‘Pepe’ Review: An Opaque, Experimental Odyssey Through the Afterlife Consciousness of a ‘Cocaine Hippo’
variety.comJessica Kiang As with so much, you can blame Pablo Escobar. Following the druglord’s 1993 death, the exotic animals that populated the menagerie at his sprawling Hacienda Nápoles estate faced an uncertain future.
Many were sent to zoos, but the hippos remained – although not indigenous to the Americas, they were thriving in Colombia. But then a rogue male nicknamed Pepe escaped into the wilds of the Magdalena river, and even before the hippo-critical hunt-to-kill order came down, became a local legend.
This is the wonderfully bizarre story that Dominican filmmaker Nelson Carlo de los Santos Arias‘ “Pepe” refuses to tell in anything except the most glancing, freeform, frustratingly obscurantist manner.
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.
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