This James Gray film seems, at first glance, to be rooted in an outdated and ideologically marked literary and cinematographic tradition, from the novels of Arthur Conan Doyle to those of Edgar Rice Burroughs. Adapted from a book by David Grann (Robert Laffont, 2010), himself inspired by the exploits of explorer Percival Harrison Fawcett (1867-1925, disappeared in the Amazon in search of a lost city), The Lost City of Z proceeds from a discreet but implacable critical work of what was perhaps, for a long time, one of the dreams of the Western white man, of his prejudices, of his illusions.
A downgraded officer, due to a socially imperfect genealogy (gambling and alcoholic father), Percy Fawcett was sent to Bolivia, to the sources of the Amazon, by the Royal Geographical Society of London to carry out a survey of borders. The expedition takes on another dimension at the end of a perilous journey. The small form of action cinema, even B series (attacks by Indians, attack by piranhas, horrifying discovery of cannibalistic tribes), blends harmoniously with the large form of the historical epic and the ample biopic.
Story of an obsession
Convinced of having found the remains of a lost civilization, encountering the incredulity of the authorities, Fawcett will try to provide proof during a second expedition which, like the first, will not meet his expectations. The Lost City of Z becomes the story of an obsession whose meaning is probably not entirely reducible to the psychology of its central character. Because Fawcett’s quest will feed on the frustration engendered by the incompleteness, upset the prescriptions of society and his family life – reduced to the moments that the man spends at home, between two expeditions.
The elegance of James Gray’s film resides in this unique way of conveying the contradictory forces that determine and oppose Fawcett’s desire for adventure and knowledge. The whole film tends towards the impossible hypothesis of a fusion of opposite worlds. Editing is here both a technical process at the service of the narration as much as it becomes the very essence of the quasi-metaphysical quest for what unites and disjoints spaces and contradictory universes, what separates the “civilized of the “savages,” the men of the women, the fathers of the sons.
We could cite a cinematographic lineage to define The Lost City of Z: David Lean for the taste for the epic, Stanley Kubrick for the description of abstract mechanisms that move individuals despite themselves, Luchino Visconti for this intelligence of social forces confronted with curse of blood ties. But that would perhaps miss the singularity of Gray’s work, which combines all these concerns with incredible subtlety.
