“What is going on now is a coup d’état, albeit a very modern and cynical one,” Mr. The selection comes as Brazil struggles with a real-life political crisis to rival anything cooked up on film: a deeply divisive attempt to impeach its populist president, Dilma Rousseff.
![sônia braga sônia braga](https://lulacerda.ig.com.br/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/sonia-asbs.jpg)
Mendonca Filho will present his new feature, “Aquarius,” in competition at the Cannes International Film Festival. Its whisker-sensitive feel for the tensions in daily lives, and the centuries of history that lie beneath, seemed to take the pulse of Brazilian society.įour years later, Mr. Dazzlingly shot and edited, the debut feature was chosen as Brazil’s submission for Best Foreign Language Film at the Oscars. But this performance is her finest hour.In the 2012 drama “ Neighboring Sounds,” the Brazilian filmmaker Kleber Mendonca Filho dissected the class tensions of a single street in Recife. Sônia Braga was perhaps known before this for her role in Hector Babenco’s Kiss of the Spider Woman.
#Sônia braga movie#
Clara has displaced these physical needs into her daily swim in the sea and daily flirtatious chat with the lifeguard who is rather in awe of her.įilho gives his movie a righteously victorious ending, the implications of which, I think, are a little strained and naive, though it certainly brings the film to a conventional dramatic crunch, skewing towards bang rather than whimper. We see how she associated a certain item of furniture with an afternoon of ecstatic lovemaking, and that dresser is still there in the flat: a reminder of how sex is a persistent pulse, a thread of continuity. Sex was important to her Aunt Lucia, too. Her mastectomy puts off a creepy silver-fox admirer, but with absolutely no self-pity Clara simply gets sex from an escort, and exults in how sex makes her feel. If Aquarius is a metaphor, perhaps it is a metaphor simply for the ageing body and its obsolescence. She loves handling these records and pointing out that her discs may be old but they reproduce the music just as well as ever.Ĭlara takes a daily swim in the sea – and flirts with the lifeguard But it is her colossal library of vinyl LPs that overawes visitors to the apartment. The maid returns to Clara in a dream – a quietly brilliant moment – as a symbol of guilt associated obscurely with the wound, physical and spiritual, of her breast cancer surgery.Ĭlara has a complicated attitude to modernity itself she is a generalist who loves both Heitor Villa-Lobos and Queen, her taste in pop music does not go later than the death of John Lennon, a watershed she discusses in a newspaper interview in which she claims to welcome digital formats and streaming. She is crudely derogatory about a maid who once worked for her mother, sacked on suspicion of stealing. Filho is fierce in his contempt for these bland corporate nabobs, but tough, too, on Clara’s haughty attitude. And it is a kingdom overrun by the forces of cronyism, nepotism and mediocrity in Brazil’s new political classes.
![sônia braga sônia braga](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/gettyimages-156733984.jpg)
Hers is a King Lear story in its way Aquarius is her kingdom and she is feeling the serpent-tooth sting of her children’s ingratitude. Then Clara’s grownup children start pressuring her as well. She hangs tough as the sinister firm tries to bully and intimidate her. But tough-minded Clara refuses the developers’ blandishments and veiled threats. But then the building’s freehold is sold to a hard-faced property company which wants to bulldoze it and put up a glitzy, lucrative block on this prime beachfront site. It is Lucia’s style she has clearly copied. She inherited it from her adored Aunt Lucia, a dissident, romantic intellectual and resistance veteran of Brazil’s era of military rule, to whom we are introduced in the opening flashback sequence. She can be a little high-handed with her maid Ladjane (Zoraide Coleto).Ĭlara is devoted to her flat in the small apartment building called Aquarius. She cultivates the bohemian lifestyle and the divaish temperament of a public intellectual, with something of the arrogance and entitlement of someone who takes her membership of the governing class casually. Braga gives her the elegant look of Audrey Hepburn. They come around periodically, but this is no placid grandma: Clara is a beautiful, sensuous woman who likes sex. She has the respectful title of “Dona Clara”, a widow with grownup children with kids of their own. The passionate devotion to music in her newspaper columns has made her well known, and her trenchant opinions, combined with an imperious manner and opulent nonconformism has made her a force to be reckoned with.
![sônia braga sônia braga](https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/sexandthecity/images/c/c3/175767_500x800x250.jpg)
![sônia braga sônia braga](https://extra.globo.com/incoming/23097743-23d-5d2/w533h800/sonia-braga-branco.jpg)
She lives in the Brazilian seaside town of Recife, where she has celebrity status, and the local equivalent of national-treasure prestige. Clara, terrifically played by Sônia Braga, is a retired music critic: Braga gives her a shrewdly judged mixture of vulnerability and hauteur.