100 years of desert solitude

In 1910, the lunatic Vasco de Sa (Ruy Guerra) leads his young, pregnant wife, Aurea (Fernanda Torres), her mother, Dona Maria (Fernanda Montenegro), and a band of men and donkeys into the sandy wasteland of the Maranhao desert in northern Brazil -- which he has somehow convinced himself is prosperous land. Aurea begs Vasco to return to the city, but he refuses and begins instead to build a house in the dunes. His men quickly abandon him, and Vasco dies soon afterward, leaving Aurea and her mother stranded on the lunar landscape alone.

Brazilian director Andrucha Waddington’s exquisitely beautiful film slowly unfolds over three generations, spanning nearly a century during which the world is completely transformed, though Aurea and Dona Maria never know it. Forced to remain in the house after an early attempt to leave proves too difficult to attempt alone, the women survive thanks to Massu (Seu Jorge), a descendant of runaway slaves who formed a small colony nearby. Like the women, the colony remains trapped in time; some even refuse to believe that slavery has long been abolished. Slowly, Dona Maria, Aurea and Massu form a tacit, nearly wordless bond and a fashion a home surreally appointed with the rapidly fading trappings of bourgeois city life.

As visually lush as it is existentially Beckettian, “House of Sand” is essentially a story of things not happening, and Aurea is a study in what happens to even a protean human will when it’s chastened by larger forces. For years, Aurea endeavors to find a way out, initially pinning her hopes on a salt trader, Chico (Emiliano Queiroz), the only man to come and go freely from the remote location. Dona Maria refuses to let her go while pregnant, however, and as the women wait for little Maria (Camilla Facundes) to be old enough to travel, their only hope eventually disappears. Dona Maria gradually adapts to her surroundings, but Aurea clings to her goal. By the time she comes across a group of scientists who have come to the desert to photograph stars during the solar eclipse, and their guide, Luiz (Enrique Diaz), promises to help her, she’s been marooned in a time capsule for almost a decade.

Introducing news of the outside world in fleeting, decade-long intervals and relying mostly on imagery to tell the story, screenwriter Elena Soarez weaves a lyrical narrative about isolation and time that recalls great space allegories such as “2001: A Space Odyssey” and “The Little Prince.” Real-life mother and daughter Montenegro and Torres play Dona Maria, Aurea and Aurea’s daughter, Maria, at different stages of their lives, lending the movie a curious continuum that’s echoed in time and space-bending theme. When Luiz tries to explain to Aurea the nature of the scientists’ work, which will prove Einstein’s theory of relativity, he tells her that if one twin traveled to space and the other remained on Earth, the space-traveling twin would return home younger than his brother. Many years later, Maria escapes the dunes. She returns to Maranhao for the first time in the late ‘60s, as an older woman (played by Montenegro), with the news that a man has walked on the moon. The elderly Aurea naturally assumes that Luiz’s story has come true.

Torres gives a touching, remarkable performance as a passionate and willful young woman lost in space and cut off from time, and as Dona Maria and the older Aurea, Montenegro gives wonderful portrayals of the aftermath of their choice to adapt and survive when it becomes clear to her that the world has passed them by. Heartbreaking and strange, “House of Sand” is as original as it is lovely.

*

‘House of Sand’

MPAA rating: R for some graphic sexuality.

A Sony Pictures Classics release. Director Andrucha Waddington. Screenwriter Elena Soarez. Story by Luiz Carlos Barreto, Soarez and Waddington. Producers Leonardo Monteiro de Barros, Pedro Buarque de Hollanda, Pedro Guimaraes and Waddington. Director of photography Ricardo della Rosa. Editor Sergio Mekler. In Portuguese with English subtitles. Running time: 2 hours, 6 minutes.

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