The House of Sand | Review

Sand and no beach make for long, dry spell.

Visually hypotonic, gorgeously desolate and alienatingly surreal, Brazil’s Andrucha Waddington’s has got visions of women stuck in the desert and decidedly this is a film where the punishment is the crime. Spanning as far as the camera eye can see with a storyline that runs as far back as the memory permits, The House of Sand is a torturous drama that metaphorically transports itself to the biblical punishment of Eve. There is a lot of estrogen in the air and sand in the eyes of this Sundance winner, and Sony Pictures Classics should find lukewarm response on this subtitled selection.

Proof that woman were both head strong and physically burly way before the late 60s women’s movement, on a timeline that spans six decades and curls back to a decade of primitive thinking, Waddington proposes a three-span generational family tale inside an expose on the fragile eco-system that surrounds us and with a three chapter volume of evolution, procreation and extinction as the walking stick guide. Wagging a war against extreme inhumane conditions and solitude, this is the sort of struggle that makes childbirth look easy and actresses Fernanda Torres and Central Station’s Fernanda Montenegro (real-life mother and daughter) split the screen duties equally, compounding the united resistance and the revolving daughters becoming mothers pattern.

Making a case for home not necessarily being the physical space one inhibits but instead the place where one’s soul is kept hopeful – this is a slow-paced affair full of sand dunes, sand storms, sand in the eyes and sand on the skin. Waddington condenses both a generational drama and elongated love story with the hour glass as a marker to make decades merge as one. The passing of time is actualized by a shrub that becomes a tree, a strand of jet black becoming white, the house slowing be or by a new person existing under the wooden shelter they call home. But it is how the storyline reserves a intriguing usage of both thesps that makes the long haul somewhat indispensable to how the story will be perceived.

Basking in sharp contrasts almost on a Koyaanisqatsi doc-like scale, Ricardo Della Rosa’s shot compositions especially in the film’s long shots make for some sublime photography making The House of Sand perhaps one of the lushest affairs captured onto film this year, yet it comes across like a visit to a museum where there is only one painting instead of a collection on display. The repetitiveness is felt throughout the film – the double role device only makes one realize that this is a seriously-long watch.

Sundance 2006.

Rating 3 stars