Wait, there’s a desert in Brazil? Well, sort of, with the sandy expanse of Brazil’s remote northern coast stretching to the visible horizon in Andrucha Waddington’s exceptional 2005 film. Less a 20th anniversary Blu-ray than a tribute to co-star Fernanda Torres’ Oscar nomination for I’m Still Here this year, the film follows decades in the hardscrabble lives of a mother and daughter stuck in the desert and forced to make the best of it.
Buy The House of Sand Blu-rayShockingly, the film stars not one Brazilian Oscar nominee but two, the only Brazilian actors ever nominated, with the elderly matriarch character portrayed by Fernanda Montenegro, Oscar-nominated for Central Station. Even more mind-blowing, the mother and daughter actors are actually mother and daughter in real life. This colors their interactions with exquisite authenticity, even as the years go by in the film and the characters jump positions in the family hierarchy, with Montenegro playing the aged-up daughter and Torres portraying her original character’s daughter, a product of the desert who has never known another way of life.
The women initially enter their fate due to the folly of a cantankerous old man who marries the daughter and quickly relocates the family to the barren wasteland to start a farm. He promptly dies in a home construction accident, but not before leaving his wife with a little nine-month construction project of her own. Now stuck in the dunes in 1910 with no way to leave and no means of communication with the outside world, the women make due in their sandy prison, eventually welcoming a baby daughter to their ramshackle hut.
With such an austere, unforgiving landscape, any slight change is cause for excitement, and soon enough the ladies befriend a local native who happens by from time to time. He’s played with simmering intensity by actor/musician Seu Jorge, likely only known to most U.S. viewers from his goofy crewman role covering Bowie songs in Wes Anderson’s The Life Aquatic. His addition as found family changes the dynamic but not the outcome, as they’re still sandlocked for all time.
Waddington dreamed up the fictional story based solely on a friend’s description of a random photo he’d seen in a bar, spinning that obscure starting point into a scintillating study of the unshakable bonds of family and resilience in the face of unceasing deprivation and solitude. It’s not really a survival movie, with Waddington far more interested in exploring the character dynamics over a half century than sensationalizing their plight. Nothing much happens, and yet the family persists, with their improbable microcosm remaining intact even as the shifting sand dunes constantly threaten to erase their presence.
The Blu-ray includes an exceptionally in-depth archival documentary that reveals the extreme production efforts needed to set up and maintain base camp and shoot in the unforgiving environment. Unfortunately, for whatever reason, the documentary apparently retains its original non-anamorphic DVD formatting, reducing the widescreen feature to a small box surrounded by black bars on all sides. Another odd formatting choice is the absence of default English subs on this U.S. disc release, with users forced to turn on subs unless they know Portuguese. The disc is rounded out with a new interview with Torres where she reminisces about the production and expresses her gratitude to Sony for the film’s U.S. Blu-ray debut.
