ABSTRACT
Aquarius is the second feature film by Kleber Mendonca Filho, film critic-turned director from the northeastern city of Recife whose feature debut O som ao redor was received with huge critical acclaim in 2012. In it Gilberto Freyre argues that sugarcane plantation society of the Northeast of Brazil provided the blueprint for social interaction in Brazil thereafter. Instead, as captured in Robbie Collins’s giddy review of the film in The Telegraph, the country portrayed in Aquarius is cordial in the sense of supremely likeable: Collins declares that watching the film will make us want to move to Brazil. “The Ministry of Culture should reward producers who achieve so much with a film budget that is so modest”. The archaic presence of a live-in and frequently uniformed maid in an ultra-modern home has become increasingly viewed as anachronistic in contemporary Brazilian society, particularly after the passing of the so-called PEC das domestica.
