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two and a half hours of projection, a few weeks in the life of a woman of nearly 70 years, in the process of being expelled from her apartment, became a map of the sky, a historical fresco. in Aquarius, the second feature film from brazilian director Kleber Mendonça Filho, is revealed as a portrait of a woman, unfolds as a meditation on time and the action resolves as a treatise on the art of war. This inexhaustible richness, this complexity, luminously detailed, do not prevent the film from sinking with thanks.
Read the interview with Kleber Mendonça Filho : “Brazil is ripe to inspire a horror movie”
the map of The sky first : the star around which it revolves is called Clara. A short and dense prologue the watch in a thirty radiant, young mother, wife subjuguante. It is found in the same place, in an apartment that overlooks the bay of Recife, forty years later. Clara, who has now taken on the traits of the star brazilian Sonia Braga, lives alone in the large room flooded with light. Music critic retired, one sees building of young journalists on the respective merits of vinyl (the walls are covered), and digital files, before returning to his solitude.
little by Little, Kleber Mendonça passing the satellite of Clara in the field. Ladjane (Zoraide Coleto), the good with which the mistress of the house maintains a relation of affection and domination ; the lifeguard of the beach delightfully named Roberval (and in fact, it will ultimately be up to him to tip the balance…), which monitors everything especially the daily bath of Clara ; three children who love their mother as you would to a deity unpredictable. They at least obey the ordinary laws of the family, domestic servants ; with her friends, her sister-in-law, Dona Clara is going to dance, because it is the first of the music she listens to at home alone – dancing.
Read the review published during the ” Festival de Cannes : Face to waves of amnesia, a reef of art and music
Use remarkable of the past
But here in this tropical sky pass to Diego and his great-grandfather, dynasty real estate developers decided to purchase the last apartment of the building Aquarius that eludes them still, the one of Clara. The building is almost a century old, crushed by the towers that surround it, its survival is an insult to the price of the square meter of the area. Clara refuses to leave a place in which every corner, every blade of the wooden floor, each crack, exude small tears of his history.
the screenplay and directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho make use of outstanding of the past. in Aquarius is devoid of a flash-back to speak of. The first sequence, which shows Clara in her apartment, at the time when it comes to triumph over cancer, is so strong, putting in game in a few minutes the characters and situations, establishing the uniqueness of the place, it becomes for the viewer a memory that he will wear throughout the film. In the course of the story, the unhooking of the reality would instead take the form of a dream, the memory distorted by the fantasies and the events of the present. Here the past does not die, it is an essential and life-changing that will.
Sonia Braga moves effortlessly from the sensual to the authority, also of Dona Clara a tyrant who abuses those who love him
If this wonderful idea is needed throughout theAquarius this is, in large part, by the grace of Sonia Braga. The star brazilian to the 1980′s (Dona Flor and her two husbands, The Kiss of the woman spider) returns to cinema after a long detour through the tv, such a sovereign returned from exile. As said by 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 grandsons. She wears her wounds (physical – that has left her cancer – and loving – the death of the father of her children, political), with the pride of a veteran. Has these attributes sovereigns respond to moments of extreme vulnerability, that the interpretation of Sonia Braga does not necessarily touching. Sonia Braga moves effortlessly from the sensual to the authority, also of Dona Clara a tyrant who abuses those who love him, behaves in aristocrat vis-à-vis of the humble.
Read the portrait : Sonia Braga walk through the history of Brazil
These ratings social could only be used to give thickness to the character. Kleber Mendonça Filho has other ambitions, that it is satisfied by expanding the field to embrace a half-century of history. Aquarius (Aquarius) also refers to the golden age that hoped to the generation of Clara (see the finale of Hair – ” Here is the dawn of the age of Aquarius “) and the building appears to be the remnant material from a utopia that was never implemented. in Aquarius takes a look without pity on a generation that never ends to say goodbye to the scene. The baby-boomers brazilians have gone through the trials of otherwise difficult-than their european counterparts, supporting, and then getting rid of the dictatorship. Nevertheless, the portrait that, in fact, Kleber Mendonça Filho will resound everywhere where the trade-offs that have reached the old of 1968 – between the satisfaction of their impulses and the apparent respect of their ideals – never ceases to crack.
Read the report : Brazil, “Aquarius” prohibited to minors
when Aquarius was presented at Cannes (where the jury has demonstrated an inexplicable blindness to it), the president Dilma Rousseff (who is an exact contemporary of Clara) has been reversed by a “parliamentary coup d’état” against which the team of the film was protested on the steps of the Palais des festivals. It was as if the story was a film critic, providing a huge corroboration to this film intimate who says the nobility and the vanity of existence, until its epilogue, which in a few plans in entomology, brings the human species to its place in the cosmos.
Read the ticket : the intimate, The prey of capitalism
Movie brazilian Kleber Mendonça Filho with Sonia Braga, Maeve Jinkins, Irhandir Santos, Humberto Corrao (2: 25). On the Web : www.sbs-distribution.fr/distribution-france-aquarius
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