Brazilian House a Mother-Daughter Masterpiece

Brazil. 1910. The harsh sandy wilds of the desolate Maranhão region to the north. Weary and pregnant Áurea (Fernanda Torres) arrives with her mother Dona Maria (Fernanda Montenegro) to pursue a dream she doesn’t want any part of. For some inexplicable reason, her husband Vasco (Ruy Guerra) has purchased a parcel of land in the middle of this inhuman wilderness, his motives as alien to his wife as any she’s ever known.

Áurea begs her husband to allow them all to leave this place before they perish, but he resolutely refuses and forces both his wife and her mother to live in a house hastily constructed on the top of a dune. With the two women watching, Vasco suffers a tragic accident and is killed paying the price for his madness and his pursuits, his mysterious reasons for bringing them all to this unforgivable place an enigmatic riddle which can now never be solved.

Thus begins an almost six decade saga in which Áurea will try to escape her surroundings, give birth to a baby girl named Maria, learn to survive with the assistance of a quiet, dignified man named Massu (Seu Jorge) and, ultimately, find peace, tranquility, even love. It is a tale of destiny shaped by environment, choices born of cruel fate and emotional accountability screaming of self-sacrifice and motherly devotion. Most of all, it is a story of the bond between mothers and daughters, and how the decisions made by one can have everlasting implications upon the life of the other.

Extolled as an Emerging Master at this year’s Seattle International Film Festival, Brazilian director Andrucha Waddington follows his award-winning “Me You Them” with the devastating “The House of Sand (Casa de Areia),” a sparse, visually magnificent tale impossible to forget. Working from a screenplay by Elena Soárez (based on a story he co-wrote), this movie is as emotionally complex as a Mike Leigh film and set on a outdoor canvass which would have made David Lean drool with envy. It is a sprawling, intimately layered character study, all of it building to a profound and moving climax that literally left me drowning within my own sea of relentless tears.

In a way, I’m really kind of surprised this one hit me quite as hard as it did. The really takes some getting used to, Waddington jumping from 1910 to 1919 to 1942 to 1969 so quickly you could almost swear you missed something. Making these time jumps even more disconcerting, the director has his two actresses play one another’s roles, both Torres and Montenegro tackling the parts of Áurea and Maria at one point or another depending on the age of the character. It’s odd, and more than a little bit distancing, because just as you get used to an actress playing one part, almost without warning she’s suddenly playing the other. As good as they are the result of this constant switching is more than a bit maddening, and by the third time it happened excuse me if I almost didn’t want to grab a handful of popcorn and throw it at the screen.

Thankfully, the women aren’t just good, they’re borderline brilliant. Montenegro in particular ripped my heart out, a dialogue late in the picture (as Áurea) pleading with a former would-be paramour to take her daughter Maria (now played by Torres) away from Maranhão chilling in its emotional resonance. Even better is a climactic moment between mother and daughter, the unspoken bond still holding one to the other so heartbreaking in its eloquence I almost don’t have the words to express how it made me feel. In that instant, Montenegro makes Waddington’s themes as crystalline as the sand under each woman’s feet, the quiet passion pulsing through the actress so stirring and strong she almost stopped my heart.

Visually, this is as majestically opulent as its characters are dramatically intimate. Cinematographer Ricardo Delia Rosa paints as glorious an image as any you could possibly ever hope to see in a Cineplex, he and the director bringing the unforgiving dunes of the Maranhão to life in resolutely minute detail. For all its faults, “The House of Sand” is as masterful and as moving as any picture I’ve seen so far this year. I loved it, and start to finish this is one sandy melodrama that simply can’t be missed.