Cannes Review: Sonia Braga Stuns In Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Quiet Triumph ‘Aquarius’

If bruised societies give rise to the best art, then Brazil is about to have a major filmmaking renaissance, and when that happens, “Aquarius” suggests that director Kleber Mendonça Filho will be at its forefront. A stunningly intelligent and considered sophomore feature (after the impressively austere “Neighboring Sounds“) it works as both a political parable and a personal portrait — two impulses often at variance with each other, because when people are used as representations of ideologies or institutions there is seldom room enough for anything as messy and ungovernable as idiosyncratic human personality.

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But “Aquarius” is a highly unusual film that lays out the basis for an allegorical correlation between setting (The Aquarius is a beachside apartment block in Recife, Brazil that is planned for demolition to make way for a new development) and State (the Brazilian political system that is, as we speak, eating itself alive), and then places in the middle of it all an individual so rounded, so emphatically unique ,and so indelibly embodied by a career-redefining Sonia Braga, that she effortlessly commands the world of the film to fall into orbit around her. It obeys.

Clara (Braga) is a 60-something-year-old mother, aunt and grandmother, and the iron-willed last holdout in The Aquarius, all the other residents of which have sold up. And so she is a thorn in the side of the developers, most often represented by the eternally smiling, youthful Diego (Humberto Carrão) whose obsequious, marketing-and-media-savvy demeanor inspires mistrust bordering on the pathological in Clara. Diego can’t proceed with his demolition plans without first getting her out, but the apartment is where Clara has lived for her whole life, where she raised her four children; it seems completely to be a part of her, and she of it. Mendonça lingers on shots of Clara not just at home, but  inhabiting it — lying in her hammock by the open window with the sounds of traffic, surf and voices floating in. He imbues the space and certain objects — in particular a small wooden cabinet she inherited from her aunt — with a semi-mystical power to trigger memories and private daydreams. It’s the power of immanence, of staying the same and keeping your secrets when all around is movement, chatter and change.

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Divided into three parts, the film is curiously structured, less a traditional three-act swell than a kind of tidal ebb and flow — in this way again reminiscent of Mendonça’s engrossing debut “Neighboring Sounds.” We watch Clara in times of repose and times of high energy, amongst her bickering family or splendidly alone, in moments of serenity and sex. But when finally, inevitably, the siegelike, drawn-out war of attrition between Clara and the developers escalates, Mendonça reminds us that the rhythms of our lives may be tidal or cyclical but time moves in a straight line in a single direction.

“Aquarius” can be read as an oblique, evocative critique of pervasive corruption masked as progress: a process as undermining to the structural integrity of a society as a termite infestation is to an old building, or cancer to a human body. But Mendonça resists simplifying his observations in this regard, defying expectations and, it should be noted, sacrificing a little narrative momentum in the process, especially during the film’s slow-burn first half.

But as we spend more time with the thrillingly alive Clara, the film comes to life too. And it’s the details away from the main plot that collect around Clara like a halo that provide “Aquarius” with such a deeply authentic, lived-in texture: her scrappy, sometimes steely but loving relationship with her children, her casual non-flirtation with the lifeguard on the beach, her extraordinary grace, her forthright sexuality (which is given a heartbreaking edge of self-consciousness due to a disfiguring mastectomy scar from her cancer surgery). Not to mention her fondness for the music of Queen (“Fat Bottomed Girls” in particular provides a transcendent moment).

Braga is simply riveting in this gift of a role. There are so few leads for women of this age available, let alone ones in which they are allowed to be sexy, spirited, admirable, unreasonable and unlikeable, and all points in between. But additionally, Mendonça’s cool, removed style, marked by an elegantly curious but never intrusive camera (from DPs Pedro Sotero and Fabricio Tadeu) is fascinated by Clara in an unusually unsentimental, unromanced way. It’s not that she is ageless or that age is not an issue — it absolutely is, as this whole film is about time passing moment after inevitable moment, about forward momentum and the futility of attempting to keeps things in stasis. It’s that this is a portrait of aging that is somehow delivered at eye level — neither tinted by condescension or nostalgia (looking down on) nor putting her on some aspirational pedestal (looking up to). Instead Mendonça looks straight across, without judgment and without pity, at the preternaturally present Clara. And of course, Clara meets that gaze, looking back at us levelly from the apartment she occupies like a queen, swathed in voluptuous folds of time and memory, while the noises of the busy world wash in through open windows. [B+]

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