The Road to Patagonia review - journey to the end of the world

The journey not the destination matters in The Road to Patagonia, an epic pilgrimage of 30,000 miles that, unexpectedly, turns into a love story.

 

Surfer boy and ecologist Matty Hannon grew up in Australia but after reading a book at university about the shamans of Mentawai in western Sumatra he dropped out and went to live with them in the Indonesian rain forest.

The prelude to Hannon’s film, which he assembled from 16 years of diary footage, celebrates the tenacity of the Salakirrat family in spite of efforts by politicians and clerics to outlaw their animistic culture: “We tell the government we’re Catholics so we’re safe and they leave us alone,” explains Aman Lepon Salakirrat.

 

Hannon stayed with the tribe for about five years but eventually returned to Melbourne and took a desk job that led to a clinical diagnosis of anxiety and depression, two words that don’t exist in the Mentawai language because the conditions are so rare.

 

In a case of "surfer, heal thyself!", he quits his job and medication, builds himself a motorbike, straps his board to the sidecar and sets off on a quest to surf the Pacific coast of the Americas from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego.

 

As you might expect from the landscape it documents, this movie is full of stunning cinematography of desert roads and snow-capped mountains and mountainous waves. Yet, like most odysseys, Hannon’s also has its setbacks and delays. In British Columbia, for instance, he meets his Calypso, a permaculture farmer called Heather Hillier but, as in Homer’s epic, the two lovers eventually part. In Tijuana, thieves steal his motorbike while he’s sizing up the waves. In Baja California, the lovers re-unite. In Chile, they become cowboys, swapping two wheels for four legs and continuing the journey on horseback, avoiding roads and petrol stations and sticking to seaweed trails.

 

Here the visual aesthetic switches from Easy Rider, say, or Point Break to Red River but the folksy soundtrack by Daniel Norgren remains the same, and so do the deep philosophical questions about the natural world and how global capitalism is destroying it.

At times Hannon’s breathless commentary betrays a superficial fixation with ecosystems and indigenous culture per se (“So we’re in the Amazon and it’s bloody lovely!”, for example) and he misses the human complexity of a story like Adolfo’s, a Chilean survivor of Pinochet’s death camps. Yet he’s obviously right about the importance of sustainability – and, like The Odyssey itself, The Road to Patagonia melts hearts with a happy ending.