Aquarius

Kleber Mendonça Filho’s second feature film shares the themes and aesthetic vision of his remarkable 2012 debut, Neighboring Sounds, where the old is endangered by the new and the past is inextricable from the present. In Aquarius, a retired music critic is the only occupant of a genial old building already emptied of its other residents in one of Recife’s rapidly changing seaside neighborhoods. Played by a radiant Sonia Braga, Clara defies little old lady stereotypes, refusing to give up her sunlit rooms and analog treasures for a hermetically sealed existence offered by the glass towers rising around her. Mendonça’s airy, widescreen compositions and decisively tracking camera reveal a character grounded in the past but still permeable to the present world. The lesser known (to outsiders) classics of Brazilian Popular Music (MPB) provide a welcome additional texture to this portrait of a life that will continue to be richly lived.