SFF NOTES: Aquarius (2016, Dir. Kleber Mendonça Filho)

There’s an impenetrable cultural density to the work of Kleber Mendonça Filho. At least there was to his first film, Neighbouring Sounds, which coded its examination of the bloody precedents of Recife’s property redevelopments to the point that its incriminations were all but indistinguishable to outsiders. Similar indictments brought to bear in his follow up feature, Aquarius, though on face value the film’s chaptered story of a woman holding out against a developer in the hope of retaining her beachfront apartment is far more accessible.

Much of this is down to Sonia Braga’s open-hearted performance as Clara. Some down to the film’s connective nostalgia. Some to its grassroots fight-the-power aesthetic. The result is a deeply satisfying muse on the importance of life experience, how that experience is expressed in the people we grow with, and how our history seeps into the objects with which we surround ourselves. And, of course, how this experience turns our houses into the homes we fight for.

Braga and Mendonça Filho evoke a deep connection to the city’s history and its free-flowing vibe. Clara defends not only a home but a way of life. She defends art and freedom of expression. She defends the analogue and the tactile. She defends the face to face. Together they bring to life an absorbing experience, brimming with music, artistry and emotion.

So far, so relatable. But the is more at play in Mendonça Filho’s film, which begins to affirm itself as the battlelines are drawn in Clara’s standoff with, honey-tongued project manager, Diego (Humberto Carrão). Face to face, butter wouldn’t melt, but underhanded tactics soon pose real threat to Clara’s heritage and by proxy Recife’s. She is left out to dry, a lone woman in a vacant block. The developers impinge on her privacy, on her personal space and her moral fortitude (at least they try to: a noisy upstairs sex party only prompts Clara to reconnect with her own body).

All this has touched nerves in Brazil, where the film’s prescient themes foreshadowed a conservative coup. Despite Aquarius’ Cannes success, the country’s new regime is attempting to bury it. This reaction points to how deep this film cuts. Deeper than audiences outside Brazil may at first expect. Mendonça Filho is going for more than the rich-woman-defends-beach-house story his film was characterised as in some conversations post-screening.

In fact, the film is open on its class politics and its criticism, albeit subtle, of Clara and her family on that score. The relationship of the family with their hired help, both past and present, is given prominent screen time and the geography of Recife’s socioeconomic landscape is not only delineated but crossed over. Skin colour, too, becomes a tangential focus, conflated with the digitalisation of life, with Clara’s children Photoshopping themselves into a whiter, higher-up-the-racial-hierarchy existence – another expression of cultural revisionism.

And, most confrontingly, as with Neighbouring Sounds, the past haunts. Clara does not only have to stare down the destruction of her past but the way in which she herself has been complicit in the destruction of the pasts of others. In dreamscapes she processes that damage.

Aquarius’ expansive field of view, of history, of lineage, lays out something as complex and intoxicating as life. Braga invites us into Clara’s world and like her we want to secure it at all costs. We are irrepressibly on her side. And we cheer her on. But there are some that don’t. We should ask ourselves, why a film so seemingly innocuous is able to cause the backlash that it has? Why is one woman’s defiant voice so resonant? Why is history so dangerous?

What are they afraid we’ll remember?

And who benefits if we don’t?

★★★★

Trailer:

Aquarius screened as part of the Sydney Film Festival 2016.

You can check out other films from the festival here.