Capitalism - Feudalism without the Kings
Tax the Rich

Movie Monday

Long before I ever understood the last line in Candide:  “All that is very well,” answered Candide, “but let us cultivate our garden.” I was speaking with a friend who had a priest as a good friend. She was saying how she and he had a conversation recently where he spent the evening explaining theology. And I said, I'm sure rather glibly: I'm afraid he's just sifting sands. And she said: That's what we're all doing. And talk about one of those epiphany moments; the times when a thought you never could have imagined would hit you does and another piece of that philosophical puzzle you grapple with all your life falls in place.

The coda for The House of Sand (2005) is another such moment and, as all such epiphanies should be, it was not expected.

The House of Sand is a visually beautiful, visually desolate movie with a surreal minimum of main cast since mother and daughter at different ages are played by the same real life mother/daughter actresses and it works. 

Two woman, mother and pregnant daughter are taken by the daughter's fanatical husband from their comfortable life in the city to live in the Brazilian desert and when he dies and they are robbed of their possessions, the movie then takes you on their odyssey of surviving in this wilderness. 

Nothing really happens except watching the women develop the survival skills necessary to live in a hostile land where their ability to interact with the local runaway slave population proves vital. A baby girl is born, time passes and when she is still a child we see her mother trekking across the desert and discovering a group of scientists. Hope springs that deliverance from the desert is near but nature intervenes. It is not until the end of the movie that the deux ex machina does finally arrive for real.

In the hands of a less capable director and cast, all of the above which may sound like the tears of boredom could be played that way. But it's not. This is a small movie, an "art" movie, but it grabs and holds you. No CGI here just unbelievable natural scenery with enough developments in the plot to prevent you from fidgeting your way through to the end.

And then at the end. After you thought you were watching a very well-made melodrama about three generation of women surviving, the director shows you that this movie has had a greater meaning. With just a simple conversation between the middle-aged daughter (the one who wasn't born as the movie started) and her aged mom (the pregnant daughter), you realize that you've been watching a movie which runs much deeper than its surface plot.

The House of Sand  is  a well-constructed, well-acted "small" foreign film and it's got a nice, quietly powerful philosophical punch which moves it to the front of the line in this category of film. Don't miss it if you can.