Aquarius and the Vicissitudes of the Brazilian Middle Class
Aquarius, Kleber Mendonça Filho (2016)
Clara, her nephew Tomás, and his girlfriend Julia, are walking on the beach. The group is heading to the house of Clara's maid Ladjane, who lives in Brasilia Teimosa, the poor section of the city, to celebrate Ladjane's birthday. Clara describes to Julia, a visitor from Rio de Janeiro, the specifics of the urban landscape—how the rich and poor are spatially separated by an (almost) invisible frontier of sewage water flowing into the sea.
This scene illuminates one of Aquarius's central themes: the tension between Brazil's cultured and socially conscious upper middle class and the people who serve them. Director and screenwriter Kleber Mendonça Filho's second feature delves into the endless social and racial anxieties and contradictions that surface time and again in Recife, one of Brazil's most unequal cities, in the northeastern state of Pernambuco.
Mendonça Filho's career started as a critic and journalist, then as a filmmaker in the shorts circuit in the mid-1990s, when Brazilian cinema was recovering from almost a decade of scarce production. A major player in that recovery was new cinema from Pernambuco (Novo Cinema Pernambucano), counting Mendonça Filho in its ranks. Several factors contributed to this bloom of artistic activity. Pernanmbuco's vibrant cultural scene, a myriad of public policies that promoted production, and a mobilization of collective creativity and collaborative work among a group of producers, writers, and directors had a ripple effect. Mendonça Filho's first works developed many of the subjects and themes he would skillfully approach in his narrative features, including his most recent, the masterpiece Bacurau (Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles, 2019).
Mendonça Filho's skills as both a writer and director can be appreciated in Aquarius's screenplay, which approaches the relationships between a well-meaning intelligentsia and Brazil's popular and wealthy classes alike. Visuals of urban transformation and gentrification serve as the story's background; the film eschews broad sociological portraits, rather engaging in the intricacies of these processes with subtlety and extreme irony.
Aquarius is magnificently led by a flesh and blood heroine, Clara (Sonia Braga). A music researcher and journalist, this beautiful and intelligent woman in her 60s lives across from the iconic beach of Boa Viagem. The contrast between Aquarius, an older, lower, yet elegant building, and the towers that surround it is shocking, but also revealing of the effects of urban growth in the city.
Aquarius, Kleber Mendonça Filho (2016)
Clara is being harassed by Bonfim, a construction/real estate company, into selling her apartment—the only one in the building that is still inhabited. The person in charge of the demolition project, and eventually the building of yet another tower in its place, is Diego (Humberto Carrão). The twenty-something grandson of the company's owner and patriarch, Geraldo Bonfim (Fernando Teixeira), Diego represents a "new" generation of American-educated entrepreneurs who nevertheless enjoy the symbolic and material benefits of the resources amassed by previous generations, possibly all the way back to slavery.
Privilege in various shapes and forms thus looms large throughout the film. Clara fights the impossible battle against the mega powerful Bonfim, an archetype of Brazil's social and cultural transformation during the last twenty years. The northeast, a region often portrayed by Brazilian cinema as an emblem of poverty and backwardness, is shown here to be thriving and prosperous for some.
Clara's everyday life reveals a source of a more concealed but still explosive conflict: the relationship with her present and past maids, Ladjane (Zoraide Coleto) and Juvenita (Andrea Rosa), respectively. In a scene of family gathering, everyone is browsing through old pictures—Ladjane enters the frame to serve wine and shows the picture of her son, killed a year before in a car accident, making everyone visibly uncomfortable. Previously, Clara did not remember a maid's name, Juvenita, who seemed great but then stole the family jewelry and ran away. Clara's sister-in-law reminds everyone that this is the trade-off for exploiting these women. Later on, Juvenita comes back in Clara's dreams/nightmares, to haunt and steal once again.
Aquarius, Kleber Mendonça Filho (2016)
If the class conflict between Clara and the super powerful real estate company is direct and openly articulated, what transpires between her and the black women of the popular classes is expressed in a less obvious manner. Framing their bodies in fragments and shadows, Aquarius posits these nameless, phantasmatic figures as a latent but unequivocal presence of the legacy of slavery and an increasing social gap ravaging contemporary Brazilian society. As a progressive figure, Clara and her surrounding friends and family members ostensibly treat their maids, painters, and janitors with cordiality and care. Yet it is this very cordiality Mendonça Filho interrogates both in this and his previous film, the magnificent Neighboring Sounds (O som ao redor, 2012).
Aquarius, Kleber Mendonça Filho (2016)
In his first narrative feature, Mendonça Filho deals with the daily coexistence of a group of neighbors and their employees in a wealthy and gentrified area, not far from Clara's apartment. The film addresses issues similar to Aquarius, e.g., a patriarchal and racist Recife society and the pervasiveness of widely circulating ideologies that deny these power structures, such as the powerful legacy of sociologist Gilberto Freyre's notions of domestic intimacy, miscegenation, and racial democracy.
Neighboring Sounds introduces João (Gustavo Jahn), the grandson of paterfamilias Francisco (WJ Solha), who lives a comfortable life thanks to a fortune accumulated by the family via sugar cane production—an obvious reference to slavery—and now, real estate speculation. Unlike his grandfather, João is kind to his maid and her children, treating them with poise, somewhat like family members.
Neighboring Sounds, Kleber Mendonça Filho (2012)
Such cordiality veils a society structured in brutal class and racial differences. While Brazilian national cinema often engages in violence as an explicit feature, Mendonça Filho uses more subtle resources. João and his girlfriend Sofia (Irma Brown) visit their grandfather at his rural estate, a former sugar plantation—as they walk around, tremors of exploitation and extreme brutality surface in the sounds of the ghosts. When João, Sofia, and Francisco visit the property's waterfall, João is bathed in a gush of blood, in reference to the lives lost and the suffering embedded in those lands.
Neighboring Sounds, Kleber Mendonça Filho (2012)
Like João, Clara enjoys the perks of her social position. In a discussion with her daughter Ana Paula (Maeve Jinkings), Clara says she can help her financially, seeing as she owns five apartments. In these small details Mendonça Filho openly confronts the subjectivities of Brazil's liberal and educated middle class. Their progressiveness is circumscribed in a paranoia of the popular classes, and simultaneously, their fear of losing their position at the hands of a wealthy elite. Aquarius approaches these taxing themes with talent, and the choice of Sonia Braga in the main role contributes extensively to the success of such an arduous enterprise.
The actress has had a long presence in Brazilian visual culture. She embodied several literary characters adapted for cinema and television in the 1970s and 1980s, acquiring worldwide fame from her participation in Hector Babenco's The Kiss of the Spider Woman (1985), scoring several subsequent roles in American television and cinema. Objectified as symbol of Brazilian tropical sexuality for decades, Aquarius allows her to display her infinite talent, maturity as an artist, her range, and her everlasting beauty.
Aquarius, Kleber Mendonça Filho (2016)