On Location: Brazil

About halfway through "Aquarius" (2016), protagonist Clara (Sônia Braga) walks with her nephew and his girlfriend out of her apartment in Recife, on the northeast coast of Brazil, down the beach to visit her longtime housekeeper. As they talk, Clara says they are crossing from the wealthier district into the poorer district. “This sewage pipe is kind of the boundary,” she explains. The bubbling pipe, its discharge predictably aimed toward the poorer section, is only one of the film’s many reminders of the inequality that looms over both middle-class and poor Brazilians.

Kleber Mendonça Filho’s "Aquarius" details the struggle of Clara, a widowed music critic and cancer survivor, as she fights a construction company that intends to redevelop the apartment building where she raised her children. The film’s portrayal of corruption in the Brazilian economy and politics made headlines at Cannes last spring, where the cast and crew protested the impeachment of former President Dilma Rousseff. Their criticism sparked boycotts of the film from the Brazilian right.

Mendonça, a Recife native, injects a distinctly local flair into the film, making generous use of lingering landscape shots of Recife’s beaches and cityscape. The sets and score communicate a slow, relaxed way of life. However, this slow-but-steady attitude is threatened by an aggressive, businesslike modernity, aided by corruption. Clara’s determination to remain in her building adds an edge to that notion as she fights to maintain a firm connection to the ground she stands on.

The long, questionably legal processes that frame the construction company’s attempts to start work on the other apartments in the building contrast with the long scenes of conversation between Clara and her companions. These scenes are the film’s best, interweaving her views on politics, love, memory, gossip and frustration with both her family’s ambivalence about her situation and what she perceives as a more deeply held ambivalence in Brazilian society. Shots linger and drift between friends, the lively music slows but retains its character and the sets juxtapose past and present. At one point, Clara throws up her hands and laments, “This is so Pernambuco [Recife’s state]. This is so Brazil.”

"Aquarius" is about people, not politics; it is a character-based story about Clara and how she copes with life changes and personal history in the context of modern Brazil. It is a place that is radically different from 10 years ago, much less 20 or 30. Similarly, Clara is a very changed woman compared to her youth. She has fought cancer, lost her husband and built a career all while maintaining her forceful yet joyful self.

Most importantly, Braga and Mendonça both deliver on the film’s central theme: a sense of uncertain certainty, in both Clara’s life and Brazilian society as a whole. The film meanders along, slowly driving home its chief takeaway: that nothing that happens to either Clara or Brazil can be predicted but that whatever happens will be predictably “so Pernambuco” or “so Brazil,” for better or worse.