Casa de Areia

The landscape looks like the surface of the moon. Set in Brazil's Maranhão desert, House of Sand follows three generations of women, from 1910 to 1969, as they eke out a living from this hostile environment. Oafish Vasco (director Ruy Guerra) brings pregnant wife Áurea (Fernanda Torres) and her mother, Dona Maria (Fernanda Montenegro, Central Station), from the city to make a new start. Shortly after they arrive, fate takes him out of the picture. Mother and daughter muddle through with the help of slave descendents. Wary at first, Massu (Seu Jorge, City of God) takes a particular shine to the duo. The story then skips ahead to 1919, when an escape route materializes. There will be two more shifts in time. By 1942, Áurea's daughter, Maria (Torres), has grown into impetuous womanhood, while Áurea (Montenegro) and Massu (Luiz Melodia) have settled into middle age. In the final section, set during the year of the first lunar landing, Áurea (Montenegro) is around the same age as her mother at the start of the film. With the exception of Camilla Facundes as nine-year-old Maria, Torres and her real-life mother assume every female role. What does it all mean? Andrucha Waddington (Me You Them) doesn't burden his enigmatic epic with a singular message, but those who appreciate dust-swept dramas like Woman in the Dunes and Walkabout aren't likely to hold it against him. The point seems to be that the human--especially the female--capacity for survival knows no bounds. --Kathleen C. Fennessy

Stills from House of Sand (click for larger image)

Amazon.com

Great film

The House of Sand, starring Brazil's academy award nominee Fernanda Montenegro, is a story of love, sacrifice, and commitment. Filmed in Brazil's northern sandy coast, the mother and daugher Maria and Áurea learn to survive the harsh conditions and make a life for themselves after Áurea's husband brings them there and dies shortly thereafter. A story of courage you won't want to miss. November 16, 2008

Outstanding, parallels to 2001: A Space Odessey

Slightly slow start, but story takes on fluid magical realism pace afterwards, never explaining to much, or underestimating the viewer's intelligence. Wide swaths of time are swept along with the sand, and the use of the two main actresses for multiple roles was cleverly effective.
Composite this with the ending climax of beethoven, advanced age, and the moon and one is reminded of kubrick's grand vision of the human question.
Simple, lyrical, and poignant; a film to ponder. October 6, 2008

foreign movie

didn't enjoy too much, but was my fault for not researching as well as I should of before purchasing. August 1, 2008

Vanity

I have never reviewed a movie before and won't really now except to suggest that this film, intentionally or otherwise is a a marvelous, deeply spiritual film. It's very aridity and sparseness; its tearing asceticism in the cell that is the beautiful, silent dunes is a cry of conscious creation looking for fulfillment and except for love, finding only sand.

I cannot speak for the writers, and perhaps this review is more about me, but this searing movie is a deep treatise on vanity; the vanity of Ecclesiastes; inching painfully, almost lifelessly along in time yet jolting into new lives, new eras, new vanities,this film speaks its deep, dare I say religious truth that the material, the ephemeral, yesterday's "new" passion, cannot even begin to fill the living soul.

Escape. Fly from our existential feet of clay to the moon and still, you will find there to your surprise, that all around you is the same dust and sand.

The sole hint of exception to this reality that so mocks our new cars and modern gross conceits, our scientisms and inane philosophies of the ephemeral and merely material, is the love.

Love appears, noticeably in the stories of those wanderings in the deserts real and metaphorical, partial and distracted love, normal human love, though it be. Practical and temporal or eroticly passive and disconnected from our internal law, its appearance howsoever fractured and incomplete nevertheless hints at what is not just sand, not just vanity, not just dead.

Only the love, fractured and disjointed for these people wandering aimlessly in the desert is not sand, and life in the end must be about love, or sand. The comings and goings of war and science and moonshots is just background noise and distraction, a further background vanity to the great silent and interior story played out in our minds and hearts.

All the rest is just so much sand. In our cells; in our deserts, we can only strip away the vain and hope to find the silent presence of love, the the sublime principle of unity and sole hope of meaning. This is no sloppy, decadent erotic escapism, but love that is about responsibility for and commitment to life, and lifegivers emerging through the grains of sand that seem to comprise our hourglasses of life. The quiet, almost inaudible voices of the great spiritual seekers and leaders of human history resonate in this powerful meditation.

Gently we are led to realize that this path can offer any hope of freedom from the ubiquitous, grating, wearing and temporal tyranny of sand. And we are reminded that despite our longings, it has the power to swallow and smother us if we can only see the sand in the hourglass of our lives, an not the love that gives it glimpses of meaning

I loved this movie.

Paul May 18, 2008

The Fernanda's are spellbinding...

Story opens in 1910 when Vasco, a fanatical Brazilian in search for prosperity, treks from an urban Brazilian city across the deserts of Northern Brazil. He ultimately settles in a desolate, sun parched area of the desert adjacent to an oasis...but it's mostly sand and more sand.

In his wake, come his pregnant wife (Maria), who he bought, and her aging mother (Aurea) - both unwilling participants in this journey. Through a series of incidents, the mother and daughter are abandoned and are forced to survive - and they do so with the help of descendants of runaway slaves in a coastal fishing village. Feeling trapped in the "nothingness" of the desert, Maria and then later her daughter (another Maria) make numerous attempts to escape back to the "real world." The full story covers 60 years.

You can feel the despair and suffocation of the main actors trapped in this isolated part of civilization. You are mesmerized by the beauty of the dunes and the ocean lapping the shoreline - there is beautiful cinematography throughout. Fernanda Montenegro and Fernanda Torres, a mother and daughter in real life - play the mother (Aurea) and daughter (Maria) in this performance - they are both magnificent.

You eventually see that Maria, like her Mother, finds out what really is important in life - some food to eat, safety, your family and good health.

May 11, 2008

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