Aquarius is a magnificent character study that captures the indomitability of the human spirit in the face of the most arbitrary and brutish structures of power. It stages a conflict between the creative verve and energy of Pernambuco’s local culture against the massive and impersonal forces of military rule and neoliberal capitalism. Writer/director Kleber Mendonça Filho utilizes Aquarius’s protagonist, Clara, as an avatar of resistance, as the message bearer of a radical call to defend local autonomy against the anonymous crush of globalization. He injects his thesis with enough nuance to make it stand up to scrutiny and the narrative with enough formal variety to make Aquarius wildly entertaining.
Aquarius is Mendonça Filho’s second feature film. Like his debut, Neighboring Sounds, the film is set in his hometown of Recife, a massive metropolis on Brazil’s northeastern shore. Aquarius grounds a meditation on economic growth and liberalized urbanization in Recife around the drama in individuals’ battles to have homes on their own terms. In Aquarius, Mendonça Filho threads a narrative line from the obscene cruelty of Brazil’s Cold War-era military dictatorship directly to the country’s current efforts to incorporate itself into the global financial economy. In both paradigms, he finds a faceless, insidious force of destruction threatening peoples, cultures and environments behind gilt-edged promises.
Clara (Sonia Braga) is a 65 year-old retired journalist and music critic who is the only remaining occupant of an apartment building called Aquarius. The building is on the booming Boa Viagem Avenue and overlooks Recife’s famous beach. A development firm, which has already convinced all of the other residents to sell their homes, would like to buy Clara’s apartment, too. Clara is unwilling to even consider an offer. Her attachment to the place runs deep, as she has lived there her entire adult life. She does not need money, either. Aquarius revolves completely around Clara. The camera and the narrative rarely leave her. Braga’s performance justifies the infatuation, too, as she masterfully captures Clara’s countercultural edge, sexual vivaciousness and stubborn conviction to stay her course.
With this narrative established, Mendonça Filho portrays the encounter between his protagonist and neoliberal capitalism as an ever-escalating confrontation. At first, Clara’s daily routines are barely disrupted by the firm’s advances. Soon, however, she must abandon her insouciance, as the firm endeavors to intimidate, annoy or otherwise chase her from the premises. It aggravates Clara’s children, hosts elaborate parties in the apartment above hers and lodges vague threats against her. Each time, the protagonist responds by more forcefully insisting she will never sell.
Aquarius does not waver from Clara’s struggle, even as the plot touches on other worthwhile topics, including the digitization of art media, homosexuality and the class divide in Recife. What this narrative attachment produces is an ever-shifting portrait of Clara’s physical and mental state. The firm’s aggressive tactics give her hallucinatory nightmares, cause her former neighbors to nastily confront her and harm her well-being. But Clara proves a worthy cinematic hero; as shown in a prologue set in 1980, she has already survived cancer and finds the construction company less worrisome than that experience. She fights back, eventually uncovering two disturbing secrets about the developers and their unsavory behavior, discoveries which provide the film a symbol-heavy climax and Clara relief from her tormentors.
The 1980-set prologue is essential to Mendonça Filho’s sociopolitical commentary in the film. It shows an already-adult, already-successful Clara who listens to Queen and lives in her apartment. She was working as a music critic and journalist at that time, in a period of military dictatorship and censorship. The director has established her age so that she would have been at university in 1968, when cultural conflict between artists resisting the government and the security forces of the state boiled over, with middle-class urban elites like Clara on the side of the artists. The prologue is telling the viewer that the protagonist made a career of pushing against the boundaries of permissibility under military rule. It establishes her as both fearless against the faceless forces of repression and a person relying on her privilege to protect her when she shouts truth at power. Refreshingly, Mendonça Filho does it all without overt exposition, trusting the audience’s intelligence.
With this knowledge about Clara, it is not at all surprising that she fights back against the new overpowering behemoth threatening Brazil: neoliberal capitalism. This is another monstrous force cloaking its destructive nature in promises of progress and growth. She resists capitalism’s insistence that everything has a price, much as she pushed back against the suppression of artistic voice. She refuses the commodification of her home. Her refusal to take an above-market price because she does not need money emphasizes the avarice of her antagonists. Mendonça Filho offers here a well-crafted and deeply-pondered critique of the marketization of Brazilian space and the country’s embrace of global capitalism, which he sees as destroying what made Recife a unique and vibrant community.
What makes the film so special is the form through which Mendonça Filho makes his sociopolitical deconstruction. Namely, he mimics the Tropicália movement founded by artists from Brazil’s northeast during the ‘60s. Both Mendonça Filho and the Tropicalistas juxtapose images of what power structures say Brazil is—a tropical paradise of sun and economic growth—with images that expose this as a lie. Aquarius regularly features sweeping shots of Recife’s ultra-modern skyscrapers gleaming in the sun. But it also shows unemployed construction workers, bought-out tenants waiting for compensation and the vile tactics developers employ to build those towers. The film places side-by-side upstart jogging clubs and ‘60s-holdover dance clubs where Clara and her retiree friends go to party. The old and the new, the promised and the real, side-by-side to show the superficiality and ugliness of those in positions of authority.
Like Tropicália, Aquarius is aesthetically audacious. Mendonça Filho constructs the film’s story through jarringly interventionist cutting and editing, a blatant reference to Tropicália’s experimental musical compositions. He has multiple enormous reverse zooms, moving backwards from Clara to full views of Recife in one shot, placing the protagonist’s tiny size in perspective as a way of criticizing the greed of the construction firm—they built all of this and yet attack this woman for her tiny apartment. The editing often creates confusion regarding whether images on the screen are reality or Clara’s delusions; at other times, the cutting style creates questions regarding how much time has passed since the previous scene. This is both an ode to northeastern Brazil’s signature artistic style and formally interesting filmmaking.
The film concludes with a manic scene of comeuppance. Clara unleashes a final salvo against the development firm, providing narrative resolution. Meanwhile, the sound editing replaces the diegetic sound of her assault with a song. The song is “Hoje,” a treasured ‘60s ballad that was regularly censored in the years of the dictatorship. In this way, the film closes with a rhetorical flourish, linking Clara’s act of resistance to the fight against military rule and putting her in a long line of northern Brazilian rebellion to established authorities.
The post Aquarius appeared first on Spectrum Culture.