Oliver.Corazon
Call at Corazon
Two newlyweds, SARAH and NATHAN, are on their honeymoon, hopping boats down a winding river in Ecuador. We meet them in the aftermath of a vicious argument a few days earlier, in which numerous truths were exposed. They are cordial with one another, each one pretending to care about the other’s thoughts and feelings. They are docked at a small town, where someone on the pier is selling various market items, and a few animals, including a monkey. Nathan proposes buying the monkey, but this upsets Sarah, who doesn’t want it. They go back and forth until Sarah realizes that Nathan won’t budge. It is only when she allows him to buy it that he makes sure she’s comfortable with having a monkey in the cabin.
With the monkey tied up in the cabin Nathan walks on to dry land and into the town, observing its inhabitants. As he watches children play he writes in a journal. We hear a dry voice-over: “Frightfulness is never more than an unfamiliar pattern. Nothing more…More than anything else, woman requires strict ritualistic observance of the traditions of sexual behavior. That is her definition of love, nothing more.” Nathan returns to the boat a few hours later, as the sky turns grey, and we hear the first rumblings of a storm.
On the boat, Sarah stares outside through the porthole, and Nathan lies on the bed reading beneath a lamplight. A few words are exchanged. Sarah starts to get restless. She begins to look for their alcohol. Nathan points it out to her, saying that he always leaves alcohol in her suitcase. As she pours herself a glass Nathan condescendingly reminds her of her problem, saying that such behavior was usually reserved for failed marriages, that it’s twenty years too early. She sneers and leaves the cabin, leaving him alone. He lies still for a minute then plays with the monkey. He gets bored with this quickly, and begins to pace. He darts outside to spy Sarah standing further up the boat, near the bow. He stares at her for what could be a few seconds or a few minutes. When he gets back to the cabin he sees that the monkey has trashed the room.
The next morning Sarah and Nathan have another argument about the monkey. The room looks better then it did the previous afternoon, but still thrown together. Sarah tells Nathan that she doesn’t mind the monkey itself, but something about it reminds of how terrible a person Nathan could be if he wanted, like he had a switch. He only smiles at her in return. She tries to soften her words after his reaction, but he says that it would be better if she meant it, for her to actually speak the truth out loud. They spend the rest of the day floating between the two sides of the river, shopping and trading. Nathan is all smiles while Sarah simmers behind a hat and a dark pair of sunglasses. That night, they lay in bed, neither of them asleep. Nathan asks her if she would really like for him to give it to someone else. She tells him, in what is supposed to a sarcastic voice, to drop it over board. He waits a moment and smiles in the dark, telling her ‘I believe you would. I believe you would’.
The next day the couple move their bags to another older, much smaller boat. To make matters worse, the jungle begins to press in; the river getting so narrow that the twisting arms of the trees reach onto the boat, scraping past the cabins, whipping the windows. Nathan drags Sarah up to the top deck where the other occupants of the boat drink, trading sides, depending on how far across the bow the branches reach. Sarah, to Nathan’s surprise says she’d rather go in and read. Nathan stays with the crowd, eventually ending up on one of the lower decks in a small, crowded room, gambling. Now completely drunk. In between hands of cards he drunkenly curses himself for losing control. He sees an official-looking man standing to one side and stumbles over to him. Nathan asks the young man if he could just pay for his room now. The man says yes, and holds out his hand. They stand there for a moment when Nathan suddenly realizes that he left his money in his room. He laughs and leaves the room.
As Nathan stumbles around the boat he is knocked over suddenly and hit in the face with branches. He looks over the railing and sees that the boat has collided with the bank. The ship grinds along, sometimes knocking Nathan down, until he is too weak to get up again. He laughs to himself and takes out his journal. We hear a voice-over once again: ‘November 18. We are moving through the bloodstream of a giant. A very dark night.’ He passes out to the grinding of rocks against the boat.
Nathan awakens a few hours later, deep into the night. The boat is silent except for a few pockets of people talking in the shadows. He approaches his cabin, and we hear a soft laughter. He thinks it’s her and opens the door, leading into another performance designed to torment. He is upset when he finds he is talking to an empty room. He turns on a lamp to find both of the beds in the room empty. He looks around him bewildered. He looks around the room, still a little drunk. He looks into her suitcase and finds that the liquor bottles are gone. He shrugs it off. He says out loud that she better not come crawling to him if she gets in trouble. He refuses to take care of her. She just better not wake him up. He falls to his bed and immediately falls asleep.
After a restless sleep, Nathan wakes up again. Only to find that Sarah still isn’t back. He stays in the room. Trying to convince himself, once again that he doesn’t care about what Sarah’s doing. He plays with the mosquito net a little and announces to no one that he wants a cigarette. When he gets outside the boat is moving again. The storm has passed. He passes a few people, then begins to ask some of them if they’d seen his wife. He grows more frantic, actually worried, as he receives more bewildered glances and shaken heads. He is informed that the next stop is coming up, that he should pack. He rushes from room to room, but still can’t find Sarah. He finally goes down to the lower deck, past room where he gambled the previous night and towards a series of cots, beneath a tent made of tarp held up with rope. He walks past the cots and leaps back towards an opening in the tarp. He sees Sarah entangled with a man on the floor, amidst beer and liquor bottles.
He walks back with a soft smile on his face and packs their bags. He leaves her bags lined up outside of their cabin. We hear a final voice-over as he walks off of the boat and onto dry land towards a train station: ‘I like monkeys because I see them as little model men. You think men are something else, something spiritual or God knows what. Whatever it is, I notice you’re the one who’s always so bestial. I think mankind is fine’. As he says this last phrase we see him in profile as the train leaves. He tries to keep his eyes straight ahead as we spy Sarah stumbling across the deck. At the last second he breaks and swats his eyes over to the boat. Sarah looks over as well and their eyes meet; Nathan’s view becomes blocked by the jungle.