Aquarius – 4.5

If I’m going to sit through a long, boring movie I want it to at least have a central character I like, or at least enjoy looking at. Here, by contrast, the focal figure, Dona Clara (played by Sonia Braga), was the least attractive person on view: stubborn, haughty, insensitive, selfish, living lazily on her pension. All her relatives, their friends, her landlord, the lifeguard, even the gigolo were much pleasanter, more reasonable and better looking. Maybe this was a brilliantly subversive movie, designed to challenge the viewer’s expectations that we would root for a widow being forced out of her apartment by a greedy developer. Otherwise, and this is the way I read it, the movie was a misfire.