House of Sand (Casa de Areia), by the
Brazilian director Andrucha Waddington from a screenplay by Elena
Soarez, is a woman’s picture, set in a masculine — indeed, a
heroic — landscape which dwarfs the men and animals making their
painful way across it in the opening scenes. What we see are the
wild and desolate sand flats and dunes of the Maranhao state in
Brazil’s equatorial North, on the pounding Atlantic. It is 1910 and
the little band arriving from somewhere far in the south must have
traveled by foot and donkey more than 2,000 miles to get there.
Obviously, they haven’t come all that way for nothing. But it’s
different for the women. The restless, ambitious, exploring men may
be pursuing a grand and noble dream — we know little or nothing
about what it might be — but the women have come because they had
to. The men endure hardship for the sake of winning or achieving
something; the women simply endure.
The leader of the party, an old man called Vasco de Sa (Ruy
Guerra), claims to have “bought” his young wife, Aurea (Fernanda
Torres), by paying her debts. This is what he imagines has given
him the right to bring her and her mother, Donna Maria (Fernanda
Montenegro), along with some hired men to this god-forsaken place,
inhabited only by runaway slaves who, though slavery has been
abolished in Brazil, don’t trust to the law for their freedom. At
least they could run away. Aurea and her mother, the de
facto slaves of Vasco, are desperate to escape, but Aurea’s
pregnancy makes this impossible on their own. She pleads with Vasco
to be allowed to return whither they have come, but he turns a deaf
ear. “There’s no going back, Aurea. No going back.” His words prove
prophetic.
With materials supplied by the slaves, especially Massu (Seu
Jorge), Vasco builds a ramshackle house on the sand. Aurea refuses
to enter it, and Vasco drags and pushes her inside. When his hired
men run off, Vasco swears that he doesn’t need anybody, but he is
killed in the collapse of part of the house he has built on the
shifting sands — a motif to be repeated more than once — and the
women are left alone.
Massu warns them: “Your house will sink.”
“We’re not staying here,” Aurea insists.
“Neither is the sand,” says Massu. “It sweeps everything
away.”
But they are staying, in spite of Aurea’s hatred for the place,
and the film uses the impermanence of the landscape, as of
masculine striving, to contrast with the iconic permanence of
womankind. At first they still expect to leave one day. When
Aurea’s daughter Maria (Camilla Facundes) is old enough to make the
journey, Donna Maria now says she wants to stay. “I am not going
anywhere,” she tells Aurea after they have lived alone on the
desolate coast for nearly 10 years. “I don’t miss it anymore,” she
says of the city that Aurea so longs for. “I like it here; I have
no man telling me what to do.”
The paradox of their having come to this place because of some
man telling them what to do and then staying because of the
relative freedom it affords them lies at the heart of the film,
which is well made and visually impressive. Its chief virtue lies
in the performances of the real-life mother and daughter, Miss
Montenegro (Central Station) and Miss Torres who are also
the real-life mother-in-law and wife of Mr. Waddington. He has
sought to create a sense of epic sweep by making the time-span of
the film cover three generations and 60 years. Half way through,
Miss Montenegro takes the part of the now aged Aurea and Miss
Torres that of her daughter, Maria. It’s a remarkable
transformation, as there is constant tension between the mothers
and daughters, who all have distinctive personalities, but it is
also a way of suggesting continuity and an almost geological sense
of feminine permanence.
The passage of time is marked by events in the sky. An eclipse
in 1919 brings scientists to the northeast coast of Brazil to prove
Einstein’s theory and Aurea misses a last chance to get away. Then
a flight of World War II-era aircraft tells us that we have arrived
at 1942. Aurea’s daughter, Maria, now grown, escapes to the city,
leaving her mother behind. Finally, the middle-aged Maria returns
in 1969 to find the now aged Aurea still living between the sand
and the sea and tells her that a man has landed on the moon.
“What did he find on the moon?”
“Nothing,” says Maria. “Nothing. I heard he just found
sand.”
Not a lot happens in this movie. Or, rather, one is constantly
aware of all that is happening off-stage while the unchanging sand
and sea and sky where the women live make up, with them, a rebuke
to the ambitions and pretensions of men. When Aurea meets Luiz
(Enrique Diaz), the military escort of the scientists in 1919, he
tells her as if expecting her to be excited that the war is
over.
“I didn’t know it had started,” she says to him.
“It lasted for four years,” he says.
“And I have been here for ten. I think.”
Einsteinian relativity has nothing on these two contrasting
views of time. Or rather of time and timelessness. The hint seems
to be that men are concerned with history and the historic while
women inhabit a kind of timeless and eternal present — even if it
is profoundly against their will. It’s a compelling vision, though
not one that leaves much room for love or wisdom or goodness or
sacrifice. Presumably in the vast sidereal distances apparent here
under what the scientists regard as “the best sky in the world”
such things are of no more moment than human achievement.
