Aquarius

Aquarius is a great film because it works at two levels at the same time: denouncing how corporations are destroying individual life, and exposing the rich complex history of a mature woman. This two layers connect in every possible way, that we end up with a brilliant film about personal integrity, a study of character in itself, and opposing it to social forces.

In the first level, we have the story of Mrs. Clara, a woman who refuses to sell her apartment to a construction corporation that already posses the rest of the building where she lives and wants to buy her apartment so they can finally start the construction of a modern shopping mall. We are facing a story of capitalism against humanism, how corporations have made us believe that every single thing in this life has a price and how greed moves people to do horrible things to others in order to achieve what we want, and it is this character who shows us how rotten is this logic by standing firm against the powerful elite.

On the second level, that social story also helps to tell the personal story of Mrs. Clara, a woman in her 60s that sees that apartment as a map to her own life. The famous Brazilian diva, Sonia Braga, offers a powerful performance, full of tonalities, of a complex woman that has gone through a lot in her life. It is a character that breathes, a character that once was young and holds her life passions. Aquarius also joins a reduced list of films that deal with the full complexities of a mature woman, showing us how rich this characters can be; from recent memory other great films with that kind of main character are Paul Verhoeven's Elle and Sebastian Lelio's Gloria, all of them, just like Aquarius, shows us female mature sexuality in an open realistic way, without hiding it with fake modesty, that is most a way to perpetuate the invisibility that media and society has casted upon it.

Brazil also plays an important role in the film. Kleber Mendonça Filho made sure that this story also talked about his country: both of how colorful and how socially unequal it is. It is not a film to make the country look pretty, but doesn't go to the extreme of only portraying its misery like other famous Brazilian films, like Cidade de Deus, have done. The music selection is great, and the production elements are very correct. Camera work is acceptable, giving the landscape and the apartment the relevance they deserve to tell the story, but it has some weird camera movements (specially zooms in) that take you out of the fiction.