Aquarius **** (2016, Sonia Braga, Maeve Jinkings, Irandhir Santos) – Movie Review

Brazilian film-maker Kleber Mendonca Filho’s  exceptional 2016 film boasts a career high performance from Sonia Braga (Kiss of the Spider Woman, 1985).

She plays 65-year old widowed retired music critic Clara, the last resident of the 1940s two-storey Aquarius building in the upper-class, seaside Boa Viagem Avenue, Recife, Brazil.

The other apartments have all been acquired by a development company, but Clara vows to leave only when she dies, and a war starts with the company. After a while, her family try to talk her into giving in. It’s the sane and sensible thing to do.

Filho’s screenplay is superbly crafted, dealing with all the many, complex, ultra-relevant arising issues, but then so is his film-making. He is a grand auteur of world cinema class. It wouldn’t be quite as good as it is without Braga, though. She gives a bravura performance.

The film smoulders powerfully throughout, bristling with a weirdly compelling low-key suspense and tension. It is all very unsettling. Though she has right on her side, and us the audience too, Clara looks like she’s headed in all sorts of wrong directions, as the war heats up and starts to get dangerous.

Filho keeps a long film (146 minutes) compellingly on track, and it finishes with a bang, in a most satisfactory conclusion that in hands other than Filho’s might be difficult to pull off. It’s not just an issue film, though it is, but it’s also a story telling film, and it’s got a first-class story to tell.

It is nominated as Foreign Language Film of the Year in the 2017 London Critics Circle Film Awards.

Filho is also the director of the equally remarkable Neighbouring Sounds (2012).

© Derek Winnert 2017 Movie Review

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