In two and half hours of projection, a few weeks in the life of a woman nearly 70 years, passes to be evicted from his apartment, became a star map, a historical epic. Aquarius , the second feature film Brazilian director Kleber Mendonça Filho, is de veil as a woman's portrait, unfolds as a meditation on time and action resolves as a treatise on the art of war. This inexhaustible wealth, this luminously detailed complexity does not prevent the film from sinking gracefully.
The map of the first heaven, the star around which it rotates is called Clara. A short dense prologue shows in the radiant thirties, young mother, subjugating wife. It is found in one place, in an apartment overlooking the bay of Recife, forty years later. Clara, now the features of the Brazilian star Sonia Braga, lives alone in big rooms flooded with light. Retired music criticism, we see building for young journalists on the respective merits of vinyl (the walls are covered) and digital files, before returning to his solitude.
Gradually, Kleber Mendonça did spend Clara satellites in the field. Ladjane (Zoraide Coleto), good with which the mistress of places maintains an affection and domination report; the lifeguard beach delightfully named Roberval (and in fact, it will eventually be up to him to tip the balance ...), which monitors especially Clara's daily bath; the three children who adore their mother as you would in an unpredictable deity. They at least obey the ordinary laws of family, domesticity; with her friends, her sister, Dona Clara will dance , because it's the first reason for the music she listens home alone - to dance.
But here in this tropical sky spend Diego and his grandfather, Dynasty developers determined to redeem the last apartment in the Aquarius building that still eludes them, that of Clara. The building is almost a century old, crushed by the towers that surround it, its survival is an insult to the price per square meter in the area. Clara refuses to leave a place where every corner, every blade wooden floors, each crack, small tears exude its history.
The script and the staging of Kleber Mendonça Filho do a remarkable use of the past. Aquarius has no flashbacks, strictly speaking . The first sequence, which shows Clara in her apartment when she has overcome a cancer , is so strong, involving in minutes characters and situations, establishing the uniqueness of the place, it becomes for the viewer a memory that will carry throughout the film. In the course of the story, stalls of reality rather take the form of dreams, memory distorted by fantasies and events of the present. Here the past does not die, it is essential and life changing will.
If this magnificent idea is required along with Aquarius, it is largely through the grace of Sonia Braga. Brazilian star of the 1980s ( Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands , The Kiss of the Spider Woman ) returns to cinema after a long detour through television, as a sovereign returning from exile. As the character, Clara is "an old woman and a child" . In defiance of the social norm, it has preserved almost intact the power of seduction that allows him to subjugate men who could almost be his grand son. She wears her injuries ( physical - that has left cancer - love - the death of the father of her children - and political) with the pride of a veteran. To meet these sovereign attributes of extreme vulnerability times, that the interpretation of Sonia Braga does not make it necessarily touching. Sonia Braga passes effortless sensuality to the authority, also making Dona Clara a tyrant who abuses those who love him, behaves vis-à-vis the lowly aristocrat.
These social ratings could serve only to give depth to the character. Kleber Mendonça Filho has other ambitions he satisfied by expanding the field to embrace half a century of history. Aquarius (Aquarius) also refers to the heyday hoped for generating Clara ( see the final of Hair - "This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius" ) and the building appears as the remnant of material a utopia that was never realized. Aquarius is a look mercilessly on a generation that never ceases to bid farewell to the stage. Brazilian baby boomers have gone through other difficult tests than their European counterparts, supporting and getting rid of the dictatorship. Nevertheless, the portrait done Kleber Mendonça Filho resonate wherever the compromises that have reached the old 1968 - between satisfying their urges and apparent respect for their ideals - never fails to crack.
When Aquarius was presented at Cannes (where the jury has shown an inexplicable blindness towards it), President Dilma Rousseff (which is the exact contemporary of Clara) was hit by a "coup Parliamentary "against which the film crew protested on the steps of the Palais des festivals. It was as if history was a film critic, bringing a gigantic corroboration in this intimate film that tells the nobility and vanity of existence, until his epilogue, in some entomological plans back here human in its place in the cosmos.
