holding out
by
Douglas Messerli
Kleber
Mendonça Filho (writer and director) Aquarius
/ 2016
Unlike
Brazilian director Kleber Mendonça Filho’s 2012 film, Neighboring Sounds, which dealt with an entire Recife neighborhood
and with the Brazil of both present and past, his new film, Aquarius, is razor sharp in its focus on
Dona Clara (Sônia Braga) and her wonderfully cluttered ocean-side Art Deco
apartment.
In
fact, the story is so focused that, except for a series of events, directed
mostly from figures outside of her comfortable “inside” world, there is hardly
any narrative to the film.
Instead, this time round, Mendonça Filho has
created a portrait of a woman, beginning in 1980, when she is still a young
married girl who has just survived breast cancer and jumping ahead to her late
middle age, wherein she has clearly inherited much of the elegance and grace of
her aunt, Tia Lucia (Thaia Perez) whose 70th birthday was celebrated
in the movie’s first scene.
In between Clara has worked as a music
critic, writing a book on the Brazilian composer Heitor Villa Lobos while equally
enjoying the music of everyone from Gilberto Gil to Queen. She has had a son
and a daughter, and now has a grandchild, Pedro, upon whom she clearly dotes.
And, most importantly, she has, over the years, become a complicated figure, a
woman, who as who daughter later notes, is an old woman while being
simultaneously a child. Braga, one of the treasures of Brazilian cinema, plays
her with a quiet and intense fortitude with a kind a steely reserve that comes
from having been sensuously engaged with both her body and her intellect. She
is both a rebel and a conservative; someone who deeply cares about ideas and
music but is not afraid of standing up against anything she feels is a threat
to hers’ and other’s well-being.
Mendonça Filho toggles between Clara’s
everyday activities of both the present and past and the increasingly nasty
efforts of the Bonfim company to get rid of her. And, in so doing, establishes
Clara’s character and the failings of her children for wishing her to sell.
Obviously, if she receives the amount the construction company is now offering,
their inheritances will be higher, and in that fact, the film wryly suggests
political issues in a country where, even as this film was being shot, the
leftist president Dilma Rousseff was being ousted in what many Brazilian
intellectuals felt to be a rightist coup d’etat.
At the Cannes Film Festival, where
Mendonça Filho’s work premiered, both the director and his cast held up signs
declaiming her ouster and suggesting that Brazil was no longer a democracy.
Certainly Clara’s warm and loving world,
her house and its lifetime of memories is no longer the refuge it once was. To
help her change her mind, the construction company hires out
the rooms above her to film a
porn orgy, which ends with a most disgusting amount of blood and shit spread
out over those apartment floors and a noise that even her records cannot
completely drown out.
Yet, Clara, herself in need of sex that
the men her age are not willing to offer the one-breasted woman, will not
succumb, but rather orders up a young man for an enjoyable night.
Aquarius,
nonetheless, is a kind of quiet masterpiece, a work sadly missing—once the
Brazilian conservatives had come to power—from that country’s selection for the
American Academy Awards. It showed only for a brief time in selected US cities.
I hope to see Mendonça Filho’s future films given far more American attention.
Los Angeles, January
25, 2017
No comments:
Post a Comment