The film shows the physical and philosophical wandering of Edmund Burke, author of one of the pivotal works of romantic sentiment, A philosophical investigation into the origin of our ideas of Sublime and Beautiful. Burke (Antony Langdon) wants to confirm what he imagined sitting at his desk twelve years earlier. Strangled by financial problems in 1769 he decided to avert bankruptcy by updating his youthful masterpiece so as to revive its success. He leaves London for the Alps escorted by the servant Awak (Nathalia Acevedo), an indigenous woman from the West Indies.
Burke looks for the sublime among the flounces wrapped in a crimson frilly suit, complete with moccasins and foulards. In contact with wild nature for the first time, predictably, he finds it detestable. Burke is one of those who grill chops and play beach tennis on the shores of Alpine lakes. Weepy and inept, he stumbles at every step, never shuts up, gets entangled, gets dirty. He addresses the environment in which he moves as useless, sad, revolting, despicable. "I've never really liked the green," he says contemplating the Alpine sea, and it's almost an epiphany. On the other hand, however: not identifying the error as confirming a vanity extraneous to shame and penance. The title of Illum Jacobi's work could be embedded in Donna Haraway's Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (2016). The prefix khthon in Greek refers to the underworld, chthonic, as opposed to Gaea, the vital surface now known as the biosphere. Chthulucene is therefore the era of underground connections, of a man who is no longer a protagonist, summit and sovereign but part of a network of living beings, a member of a community.
Jacobi places before our eyes a good part of the dualisms sprouted from Cartesian thought and collected in a list by Val Plumwood in 1993 in Feminism and the Mastery of Nature: Burke is a white, European, cultured and civilized male - too much too. When he is not engaged in clumsy attempts to free himself from the hindrances he sings about himself, reason, man's invincible will. It fills the "deafening" silence with a compulsive naming, with an exhausting stream of consciousness. Awak is his nemesis: female and Amerindian, therefore primitive, she is calm, silent and contemplative. Once abandoned the monstrous baggage of the master (almost the metaphor of his unsustainable ego) she moves gracefully dressed only in a white veil unable to hide its shapes. Whether Burke's pathetism arouses annoyance or at most some smiles, Awak bewitches, exudes charisma, remains a mystery.
The shots and backgrounds enhance the radical diversity of the relationship between the two with the earth. Burke is filmed from above, lost in a hell cluttered with withered trunks and annoying insects or surrounded by boulders and climbs on which he tries uncomfortable seats. We follow Awak looking into her eyes, we see her participate in a flourishing Eden in which she plunges half-naked, in peace. She reads the landscape, observes plants and animals in silence. In a moment of definitive symbiosis (eco-sexual, in fact), she accompanies one hand between her legs while with the other she caresses the mosses. By contrast, Burke filters the landscape with his nose stuffed into a book - his own - waking filthy, hooded, with bare testicles and a crooked wig. At the rise of jealousy for Awak and her empathy with the earth, he can only reaffirm the hierarchies of power: "I am the master and you serve me".
