Beginning in 1910 and spanning nearly 60 years, Andrucha Waddington’s widescreen epic stuns with arid allure from the very first frames. As painterly rows of dunes give off an illusion of rusting, it’s the debt-ridden marriage of Áurea (Fernanda Torres) and Vasco de Sá (Ruy Guerra) that’s fast corroding. He’s dragged his pregnant wife and her stoic mother, Donna Maria (Central do Brasil’s Fernanda Montenegro, Torres’s real-life mother), on a monomaniacal quest into a blinding-white hell of windswept Brazilian sand, the deed he holds offering little more than a mirage of future prosperity. When he dies suddenly, three generations of women are condemned to a life of hardship, aided only by Massu (Cidade de Deus’s Seu Jorge), a descendant of runaway slaves. An eroticized prison rooted in Hiroshi Teshigahara’s seminal Woman in the Dunes emerges, and it captures the hearts of Torres and Montenegro, who portray multiple roles brilliantly.On the Web
The official Web site of House of Sand: http://www.sonypictures.com.br/hotsites/cinema/340/poster.htm
