Holding out for the past
Braga’s performance reminds us why she’s Brazil’s greatest actress.
The second fiction feature by critic-turned-director Kleber Mendonça Filho is, like his sublime Neighbouring Sounds, set in his
birthplace, Recife, in Brazil’s north-east, and in an apartment complex that serves as a microcosm of the country’s wider anxieties about property and class.
Clara (Sônia Braga, best known internationally for 1985’s Kiss of the Spider Woman) is the sole remaining owner-occupant of the ageing waterfront residence, defying pressure to sell to a developer who wants to build a luxury condominium.
The first of the film’s three chapters fills in her younger backstory, but by chapter two, she’s 65, a widowed survivor of breast cancer among other tribulations, and her devotion to the past is more than pig-headedly sentimental.
As much as anything else, it’s a film about the persistence of memory: Clara describes a clipping of an interview with John Lennon printed days before his murder as “a message in a bottle” and, in
one of the film’s most telling exchanges, sneers that “when you like it, it’s vintage; when you don’t like it, it’s old”.
The film’s biting socio-political subtext – it’s a rebuke to a country so obsessed with progress that it bulldozes its past – perhaps explains why it was passed over as Brazil’s entry for the foreign-film Oscar. But it works on its own terms, despite occasional longueurs and an ending that seems remarkably abrupt when measured against the meditative and melancholic pace.
And it’s a tour-de-force performance by the veteran Braga, Brazil’s greatest actress, who is in virtually every frame of her two chapters. She embodies a complicated character – wilful, proud, passionate and shrewd – with grace and poise, giving us a woman quietly raging at much more than the dying of the light.
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