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Review
Aquarius review: Sonia Braga's role of a lifetime turns struggle into pure pleasure
Dir: Kleber Mendonça Filho; Starring: Sonia Braga, Humberto Carrão, Zoraide Coleto, Irandhir Santos, Pedro Queiroz, Bárbara Colen. 18 cert, 146 mins
If you thought Sonia Braga had the role of a lifetime in Héctor Babenco’s Kiss of the Spider Woman, wait until you get a load of Dona Clara. The heroine of this tremendous second film from Brazil’s Kleber Mendonça Filho fits a lifetime, and more, into one role.
Clara is the last-resident-standing of a picturesquely crumbling low-rise beachside block – the Aquarius of the title – in the coastal city of Recife. And much as a local property developer might hope otherwise, she’s going nowhere. The company wants to buy her out, bulldoze the place and throw up a skyscraper in its stead, but the 65-year-old swats away their ploys with the kind of leonine hauteur we mortals could only hope to rehearse post hoc in the bathroom mirror.
She’s a breast cancer and chemotherapy survivor, and her long black hair, which often hangs down her back in a Modigliani sweep, stands as glossy proof of her fearsome capacity for perseverance. She’s also a retired music critic, and the walls of her apartment are lined with books and records – a lifetime’s work and pleasure shored up around her like an extra layer of wolf-proof bricks.
Close up, Mendonça’s film is about Clara’s ongoing war of wills with the developers – and particularly the owner’s son Diego (Humberto Carrão), newly returned from business college in America with a slippery smile and an industrial-strength brass neck. (Any similarities to Brazil’s own interminable real-life corruption scandals are, you’d assume, entirely intentional.) But take a few steps back and it becomes a broad-canvas celebration of neighbourhood life – just like Mendonça’s 2012 debut, Neighbouring Sounds, it’s endlessly fascinated by the interlocking tick of its characters’ lives.
Clara may be the motor that keeps the film’s intricate story turning, but every last cogwheel proves to be indispensable, from Clara’s long-serving housekeeper Ladjane (Zoraide Coleto) to her grown-up children and favourite nephew Tomas (Pedro Queiroz), the lifeguard (Irandhir Santos) who watches her with a mix of protectiveness and reverence while she takes her morning dip – even the hunky gigolo she summons to help her escape the pressures of the present.
One night, the developers try to crush her spirits with wild sex and loud music: in a punch-the-air-wonderful reversal, she ends up comprehensively outdoing them on both counts.
More? Step back further still and things get metaphysical. Clara’s home isn’t just where her heart is: her home and heart aren’t easily divisible, and her memories are tucked away in her belongings just as tangibly as the old newspaper clipping she pulls from a faded LP sleeve. In the film’s gorgeous, toast-coloured 1980-set prologue, the young Clara (played by Bárbara Colen) throws a 70th birthday party for her redoubtable aunt Lucia, who keeps smiling distractedly at a sturdy wooden cabinet in the corner of the room while her grandchildren recite a sweet speech.
A juicy flashback reveals why: much earlier in Lucia’s life, that cabinet played a pivotal role in an ecstatic and evidently unforgettable sexual encounter – we see her younger self perched naked on top of it, while her now-departed husband kneels at its base, his head buried between her thighs. Forget Faulkner’s doom-laden maxim about the past never being dead, or even past. In Aquarius, that’s cause for celebration.
Mendonça’s filmmaking has an effortless visual and narrative flow that makes it ideal for capturing the everyday magic that memory can work. Dreams feel realer than reality – Clara’s nighttime imaginings are cut with a rhythm that sets your skin prickling – while the virtuoso ending slams truth and metaphor together with the force of a motorway pile-up.
Madly overlooked by last year’s Cannes jury, and denied an Oscar run by Brazil’s politically charged selection board, Aquarius hasn’t had it easy. But perhaps that’s oddly apt. It’s a film that turns a struggle into pure pleasure.