“Here no man tells me what to do.”
The Brazilian film House of Sand is a story of three generations of women, but it’s also an allegory of the tenacity and continuation of life. The film begins in 1910 when Vasco de Sa (Ruy Guerra) drags his new bride Aurea (Torres) and her mother Dona Maria (Fernanda Montenegro) out into the middle of a desert wasteland. After an arduous journey, accompanied by workers toting various household objects, they arrive right in the middle of … precisely nowhere–one sand dune looks amazingly like the rest here, and Vasco announces that they’ve arrived at their new home, and he has the deed to prove it.
Deserted by their workers, Vasco, Aurea and Dona Maria are effectively marooned, but Vasco is undaunted and he builds a house on the sand. Aurea and her mother are horrified and want to return to civilization. At this point, it becomes obvious (if you didn’t already suspect it) that Vasco is quite mad. The fact that he waves around his deed to a large plot of sand is a good indication, but when it’s combined with his desire to actually build a house on the sand, no more proof of his insanity is needed.
Aurea spends years of her life trying to escape this desolate place, and the film covers her struggles and also eventually covers the life of her daughter, Maria. The women survive thanks largely to the assistance of the descendants of runaway slaves who live nearby managing to eek a living from the harsh terrain. Even though slavery has ended in Brazil, the runaway slaves (and their descendants) aren’t particularly interested in the news that they can now return to ‘civilization.’
On one hand, the continual shifting of the sand offers no permanence to these desert dwellers whatsoever, and yet the film’s characters are firmly locked into this inhospitable location. They make homes and they survive–life continues–although its fragility is a constant. Maria’s plight is particularly pathetic as she grows up completely wild. Montenegro and Torres remain on the screen throughout the film–with Montenegro playing the aging Aurea in 1942, and Torres playing an adult Maria. Torres and Montenegro are mother and daughter in real life, and Torres is married to the director.
House of Sand is a beautiful film. Some scenes of the sand are so blindingly white, it almost appears as though the characters live in deep snow, and this particular area of the desert is subject to terrific storms–the puddles become a vast area of water during the rainy season. Directed by Andrucha Washington, the film is in Portuguese with subtitles.
