Wheat-dogg's World

Caption: Áurea (Fernanda Torres) talks to Luiz (Enrique Diaz) in Casa de areia.

On our day off Monday, I ended up watching TV in the afternoon and stumbled upon a Brazilian movie on Starz, Casa de areia (House of Sand), that to my surprise had references to Einstein’s relativity theory in it.

The plot is minimal. The movie’s effect comes from the acting and the ironic turns in its main characters’ lives.

Áurea is a young, city-bred woman whose husband has the crackbrained idea of moving to a godforsaken plot of land on Brazil’s arid northeast (O Nordeste). Her mother, Dona Maria, accompanies them. The husband dies before the birth of Áurea’s only child, Maria, leaving the women essentially stranded in the middle of nowhere.

Áurea wants to leave in the worst way, while Dona Maria would prefer to stay. There are no men to tell her what to do, Dona Maria says. After nearly a decade stuck in O Nordeste, Áurea arranges to leave with a wandering peddler who sells salt and other sundries to the few people living in the region.

But the peddler dies en route to the women’s house. Áurea and their neighbor, a reserved man named Massu, go in search of the peddler. Along the way, Áurea tells Massu she will finish the trip on her own, following tracks in the sand. After two days, she comes across the campsite of a group of scientists photographing the solar eclipse of 1919.