Aquarius (2016) Review: Sônia Braga Holds Her Ground

Is Aquarius worth watching?

Yes. Aquarius is one of the best Brazilian films of the century, a sensual, intelligent and quietly furious portrait of a woman defending her home and her history, with Sônia Braga in the performance of her career. Kleber Mendonça Filho turns a dispute over an apartment into a study of memory, class and power. The only real caveat is its pace: at nearly two and a half hours, it takes its time, and viewers expecting a conventional David-and-Goliath story may find it meanders.

What is Aquarius about?

Clara (Sônia Braga) is a widowed former music critic in her sixties who lives in the Aquarius, an elegant two-storey 1940s building on the seafront of Recife, in north-east Brazil. She is the last resident. A construction company has bought up every other apartment to demolish the building and put up a tower, and its polished young executive, Diego (Humberto Carrão), is determined to make her sell. Clara, surrounded by her records, books and family memories, has no intention of leaving. Her grown children, including her daughter, Ana Paula (Maeve Jinkings), are less sure she should resist, and Clara’s friends, among them the lifeguard Roberval (Irandhir Santos), watch the pressure mount.

Aquarius is written and directed by Mendonça Filho, his second fiction feature after Neighboring Sounds. It is a Brazilian production in Portuguese that runs 146 minutes, and it premiered in competition at Cannes in 2016.

A film that lives inside a home

Mendonça Filho understands that a home is made of memories as much as walls. The film opens with a prologue decades earlier, a family celebration in the same apartment, and throughout the story, objects keep carrying the past into the present: a chest of drawers, a stack of vinyl, a photograph. Clara’s resistance is not just stubbornness; it is a refusal to let her life be erased.

The film is structured in three chapters and moves at an unhurried, conversational rhythm. There are long scenes of Clara swimming, listening to music, dancing and arguing with her family, and they are the point. By the time the developer’s pressure turns from polite to sinister, we know exactly what she stands to lose.

Sônia Braga’s commanding presence

Braga, an icon of Brazilian cinema since the 1970s, gives Clara a charisma that fills the screen. She is proud, funny, sensual and sharp-tongued, a woman who refuses every expectation of how a widow in her sixties should behave. She has survived serious illness, and the film treats her body and her desires with frankness and respect.

The performance is also full of steel. In her confrontations with Diego, who hides his contempt behind courtesy, Braga shows Clara’s anger rising slowly and precisely, and it is thrilling to watch. The supporting cast is strong, especially Jinkings as a daughter whose frustration with her mother hides old wounds.

Class, power and quiet menace

Beneath its intimate surface, Aquarius is a pointed political film. The developer’s campaign, from noisy parties in empty apartments to bureaucratic pressure, shows how money and connections shape a city, and Mendonça Filho’s camera is alert to the class divisions between Clara, the family’s domestic workers and the men in suits. The film was released amid Brazil’s political crisis of 2016, and its themes of power and resistance felt pointed at the time. The limitation is that Diego is more symbol than person, a smiling face of corporate greed, and a few subplots drift away from the central story.

Who should watch Aquarius?

It is ideal for viewers who love character-driven drama, Brazilian cinema or slow, richly textured films about memory and place. It includes some sexual content and nudity, frank talk about illness and a few unsettling moments, and suits adult audiences. It rewards patience and attention.

For more from Brazil:

• The Secret Agent, Mendonça Filho’s later thriller, which returns to Recife and its buried histories.
• I’m Still Here, another portrait of a Brazilian woman’s dignity in the face of forces trying to erase her family’s past.
• The Second Mother, a sharp study of class tensions played out inside a Brazilian home.

The verdict

Aquarius is a rich, patient and deeply satisfying film that turns a fight over an apartment into a portrait of memory, dignity and resistance. Its length and a one-dimensional antagonist are minor flaws beside Braga’s magnificent performance and Mendonça Filho’s sure hand.

Rating: 4.5/5