Aquarius Is a Remarkable Journey

Aquarius’ titular building is a charming two-story number built in the ’40s, a beachside apartment building in Recife, Brazil, where Clara (the utterly luminous Sonia Braga) has been living for decades. She's raised her children here, and buried her husband here (figuratively), and the walls of her comfortable place are a warm and earthy museum of a life lived in pursuit of knowledge and pleasure. And then, as such things often do, chaos shows up at the doorstep in the form of the Bonfim family — a multigenerational assortment of land developers who want to buy the building, demolish it and rebuild as a multi-story luxury condo development.

That's the basic conflict. It's one deeply relevant to anyone concerned with the issues plaguing modern housing, and certainly one that anyone suffering identity crises over the visual schizophrenia of “New Nashville” will viscerally respond to. Clara, having no interest in the Bonfim money (because she loves her apartment, but also because she is independently wealthy), is either the speedbump standing in the way of progress, or the unlikely bastion of integrity who refuses to sell her memories and allow her life to be bought out from under her. And throughout the course of the film, we watch the interactions between these factions start with formalities, slip into skirmishes both amusing and unsettling, and then finally escalate into war.

As anyone who's lost a home to luxury development can tell you, the housing market has always been a political space. Writer-director Kleber Mendonça Filho has thereby made a deeply political film, but one that takes its time with its many characters and ideologies. There are several family gatherings and meals, sunny walks of grave import, cocktails that lead to investigations, debauched parties thrown by friends and foes, and an opening beachfront drive that sets up the whole of the film thanks to Queen and a well-timed joint. Aquarius is not a polemic, and it's much more interested in rooting the viewer's experience of the building with the tactile, or with the more concrete regions of memory. There's a chest of drawers that goes back several generations, and it triggers the most deeply sensual of different subtle flashbacks for several of the characters who have at some point possessed it in their homes. We learn things about everyone in this film, their kinks and prejudices and preferred spices.

Mendonça and his crew (particularly cinematographers Fabricio Tadeu and Pedro Sotero) have made a film that can't help but play Proustian games with your subconscious as you watch it. In the sense that we as viewers take our emotional baggage with us whenever we see a film, it stands to reason that the architects of the illegitimate coup in Brazil would see this film as an attack upon them. When Aquarius premiered at Cannes earlier this year, cast and crew staged a protest about the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff on the red carpet, drawing international attention as well as internet trolling. It's unfortunate that the external political drama has taken over discussion of the film, as it's an exceptional character study of person and place. But this film should angry up the blood a bit, at the very least bringing more awareness and conscience to the act of reshaping modern landscapes.

Its ending is a subject of some controversy, with some viewers feeling it doesn't resolve much of the central conflict in a decisive way. But in the time we spend with Clara — the enthralling, warm, joyous and sometime maddening emotional roller coaster of her life — we get a feeling for this singular woman, and the course of action taken is perfectly in keeping with all that we've seen before, on all sides. This film is as bawdy and brassy as Steel Magnolias, and as political as Over the Edge or If … . It's a remarkable journey, and a testament to the enduring majesty of Braga, in a magnificent central performance.

Email arts@nashvillescene.com