"The Furniture" is our weekly series on Production Design. Click on the images to see them in magnified detail.
The Lost City of Z begins with Percy Fawcett (Charlie Hunnam) in hot pursuit of a stag, risking his limbs to win the respect of his superior officers. Two things are obvious in an instant: his athletic ability and the enormous chip on his shoulder. Burdened by the memory of his alcoholic father, he throws his whole body into the quest for social redemption.
Unfortunately, this burst of exertion doesn’t pay off. He does get the stag, its lifeless head displayed prominently at the evening ball. But it’s not enough. The labyrinthine snobbery of England is presented by writer/director James Gray as an impossible obstacle, as resistant as the dense rainforests where Fawcett later seeks his fortune.
After this initial frustration, Fawcett accepts a cartographic mission to Bolivia. There, he is seduced by tantalizing stories of a lost city of gold. It becomes his obsession. In turn, the contrast between rigid England and lush Amazonia drives the film’s visual logic...
It’s especially clear upon his return to the Royal Geographical Society, where his ideas are met with scorn. His dream will not fit into its hierarchical halls, where orderly pews and sternly watchful portraits regulate discovery.
Unfortunately for Fawcett, he doesn’t have evidence. Production designer Jean-Vincent Puzos (The Childhood of a Leader) and set decorator Naomi Moore only offer details, hints from which his ambitious mind can leap to conclusions.
And these are few and far between. The wider design strategy is one of fantasmagoria, an uncanny atmosphere of dangerous suggestion. Nothing is as it seems on the river, where this wreck of a boat is but a corpulent trap.
Flamboyant brutality is everywhere. A Portuguese baron sits in his opulent lair and flaunts his illegal enslavement of indigenous people. Later, an Amazonian village displays an act of cannibalism. Neither of these scenes seems to bother Fawcett, whose fanatical attitude has already moved beyond any ethical consideration. He takes slaves with him up the river and partakes in the anthropophagous meal.
He is thus unmoored from the personal and professional expectations of England. His return is miserable. He argues with his colleagues and loses interest in his family. Not even his aggressively floral wallpaper can replace the density of the Amazon.
Fawcett’s hubris follows him even into the trenches of First World War. Urged on by an improbable fortune teller, he looks into a crude drawing of the jungle and yearns. It gets caught in the barbed wire of the Somme and flutters, wistfully.
As the film drags on, Gray begins to indulge the psychology of his protagonist. Fawcett’s last expedition is visually emancipated from the oppressive architecture of English officialdom, somehow both towering and claustrophobic. They finally arrive at a small indigenous village, its low thatch houses arranged around a large clearing. It’s the perfect opposite of the Royal Geographic Society.
The villagers take Fawcett to his final destination. Gray doesn’t actually show us a lost city, of course. But the winding parade of torches leads into the distance, where mysterious lights appear above the trees. It’s a hopeful disappearance for a man who has finally given up his dreams of English fame to pursue a more personal truth.
The problem is that it’s nonsense. Fawcett wasn’t looking for evidence of indigenous civilization, ancestors of contemporary Amazonians. He was a devotee of Theosophy, a racist and conspiratorial philosophy spearheaded by Helena Blavatsky, an occultist and author. The medium in the trenches suggests her presence, but obscures her ideas.
The Theosophist interpretation of history involved an Aryan Atlantis, among other theories that would fit right in on “Ancient Aliens.” Fawcett was looking for a “Great White Lodge” that had birthed a nebulous master race, an insane Eden. ‘Z’ was not his escape from the social hierarchy of his homeland, but rather the projection of an even more deranged worldview.
And so the most resonant set in the film is none of the above. Rather, it is the al fresco opera house of the rubber baron. Here is Così fan tutte, a European comedy of manners written for an Emperor, staged in the jungle at great expense. It’s a reminder that Fawcett isn’t any sort of hero, or even one of the conflicted scientists in Embrace of the Serpent. He’s Fitzcarraldo, whether or not Gray can see it.
