By Chlotrudis Independent Film Society
Director: Kleber Mendonça Filho
Starring: Carla Ribas | Humberto Carrão | Irandhir Santos | Maeve Jinkings | Sonia Braga | Zoraide Coleto
Country: brazil, france
Year: 2016
Running time: 146
IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5221584/reference
Chris says: “Although she’s best known for her role in KISS OF THE SPIDER-WOMAN from three decades ago, Sonia Braga delivers a monumental, career-best performance here as Clara, a retired music critic who staunchly refuses to sell her Recife, Brazil apartment (inherited from her aunt) to developers who want to tear down the building. As a character study, the movie is Clara/Braga and we come to know her both as a mighty force of nature and as an intricate, flawed, fully relatable individual. AQUARIUS gradually, masterfully builds to its shocking, cathartic final scene, and it simply wouldn’t work without Braga at its center.”
TC says: “When it comes down to it, this film can be boiled down to one succinct thought – one elderly woman’s battle to do what she thinks is right and for who she is. But for this intricate, occasionally uncomfortable, and deeply thoughtful film, it’s how you get there that makes it worth the time to invest in it. Through both obvious and not-so-obvious means, both through the camera lens and through dialogue, director/writer Kleber Mendonca Filho weaves his way through a life that was and a life that now is and brings them together with just the right touch of grandeur, along with the perfect pinches of pathos, humor, angst, anger, humility, and of course, music. And it completely works.”