Focused On Inconspicuous Female Characters

ALICE’S HOUSE (A CASA DE ALICE), a slowly developing family drama set in an unidentified North Brazilian city, demands some patience from the viewer at the beginning. The opening sequences forecast just another schematic, everyday life story about the lower class. But when the sick, patriarchic relationships between family members starts to be revealed, step by step without even noticing it, we become deeply involved in the characters’ lives. Chico Teixeira in his feature debut shows man-woman relations in a macho-society from a very original point of view.

Both the story and filmic language used are far from spectacular. A little sloppy camerawork often has a documentary feel. There are a lot of close-ups, but we can also see the depressive scenarios the family lives in: an ugly flat somewhere in the suburbs and the shabby beauty salon where Alice, the title character, works. Her husband, a middle-aged taxi driver, cheats on her with a teen girl, who’s at the same time pretending to be Alice’s friend. Three sons, all in the rebellion age, are connected with intensive love-hate relationships and make Alice’s house a place buzzing with testosterone. Making a mess all over the flat, watching television, fighting with each other, they stay in the middle of the action most of the time. Nevertheless the male characters serve just as a background for female ones in this movie. The person, to whom the viewer pays most attention, is the one standing in the shadows during the whole film. It’s the grandmother, who doing her chores, being treated as a servant by her grandchildren and son-in-law. Besides that, they want to get rid of her as she’s becoming blind. Her only pleasure is listening to a fortune-teller on the radio. She seems to be invisible for everybody except her daughter.

The director draws the connection between two women brilliantly. For instance, in one significant scene on the balcony, Alice smokes a cigarette and her mother just gives her this certain look. Nothing happens, but there’s more tension in this than in all the meaningless actions taken by the men. That’s because the viewer knows that Alice still hasn't discovered the fact that her husband has been having an affair and the grandmother knows about it already. When the final struggle between brothers takes place, Alice exhibits all her suppressed anger. Then she’s the one blamed and called “crazy” by her own child. After she moves out to her lover’s place, lying that she’s going abroad, her husband puts the grandmother in a nursing home.

Meanwhile the situation at the house becomes even more tense, because Alice starts an affair with the husband of one of her costumers. The sexuality shown in Teixeira’s movie strays far from hot-tempered-Brazilian’s cliché. There are not only two affairs, but also a gently drafted hint about one of the brothers’ homosexuality. Here, and also in some other cases, the director shows that quietly suggesting is one of his favorite methods of telling stories.

Anybody, who left the press screening before the movie finished (and there was quite a few of those), missed the most beautiful and touching scene. At the finale, the grandmother, left alone in the nursing home, at last succeeds in calling the radio fortune-teller. When she’s talking on the phone, this is the very first time we get to know her name. Earlier she was just a grandmother, a mother and a servant. In the last minutes of the film she turns out to be its most powerful character.

Malwina Grochowska

© Berlinale Talent Campus 2007