Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Age and ‘Aquarius’
At 66, actress Sonia Braga got the role of her life.
While female actors are fighting for more and better roles in Hollywood, Sonia Braga got the part of her life at 66 in Kleber Mendonca Filho’s “Aquarius.”
The Brazilian star is getting rave reviews for her portrayal of Clara, a widow and retired music critic reluctant to sell the seaside apartment that holds her most cherished memories. “Ms. Braga is a living embodiment of the glories of Brazilian cinema,” said The New York Times. “A breathtakingly intuitive actress, she’s beautifully aged into an aristocratically sensual physicality, and makes Clara’s firmness mingle with tenderness,” said Variety.
“When I got the screenplay it was one of the most beautiful gifts I was getting in my whole life,” Braga said recently in New York, where she lives. “I was reading the best screenplay that I ever read. Every word made sense. Scene to scene made sense to me, through the end.”
On top of that, “Kleber was giving me a movie that I was going to do in my mother tongue after 20 years working in the United States, I was going to be speaking in Portuguese again,” she said. “I called him immediately. Well, I didn’t call him IMMEDIATELY because I had to breathe before I could call.”
“Aquarius “debuted last May at the Cannes Film Festival, where it was the only Latin American production competing for the Palm d’Or, and was recently nominated for an Independent Spirit Award. Although many considered it a natural contender for the foreign film Oscar, Brazil submitted David Schurmann’s “Little Secret” instead, reportedly because of the “Aquarius” cast’s protest against the interim administration of Brazil’s Michel Temer at Cannes.
Braga said she and her cast-mates had no regrets about the protest and that she would do it again without question. As Mendonca Filho put it, “Aquarius,” which had a limited U.S. release in October and is still opening in different cities around the country, represents Brazil, regardless.
Braga spoke about playing the rolse of such a complex character.
“Clara and I would come from different places: she is academic, I am intuitive; she has a family and I’m not married, I don’t have kids. So we had a lot to negotiate, but the basics of the character, it was there,” she said. “So we’re talking, Clara and I, but at the same time we are commemorating this opportunity that Kleber was giving us to play this for the audiences.”
Braga touched upon the topic of women playing leading roles over time.
“Well, the doors are there, and they closed,” she said. “A reporter told me it is very rare to see a woman of my age in the movies. Right! In the movies! But they have been for so long in very serious and important positions in life: scientists, prime ministers, candidates to be the president. There is a barrier with the languages also, and with the accents as well. Today we find many actors, they are Latin, they are Hispanic, they are living in the United States, they are American, but very rarely you find them in a lead role.”