Image via Wikipedia

A dandy long shot—in House of Sand (2006)—of Brazilian travellers and their donkeys treading a sand flat in 1910 precedes a close-up of two bone-weary women walking side by side.  They are mother and daughter, Donna Maria (Fernanda Montenegro) and Aurea (Fernanda Torres), the latter married to a loony gent named Vasco, the payer of Aurea’s debts, who intends to construct for his young wife a figurative house of sand among the dunes of Brazil.  In other words, he has moved Aurea and her mother to start a new life in this barren place.  But a house of sand is still a house of sand.  The trip is a miserable failure:  Vasco dies in an accident and Aurea and Donna Maria, hating the sand dunes, are henceforth stranded.  They can’t get out on their own—Aurea is pregnant—and except for an itinerant man who finally dies, during a ten-year period no one can help them.

Unpredictably, Donna Maria starts liking the place, stating there is no man there to tell her what to do.  The women in the film do depend on men, though, and willingly have sex with them.  Screenwriter Elena Soarez is not trying to make a feminist point in Casa de Areia.  And it must be pointed out that after Aurea’s daughter Maria (she, too, is played by Fernanda Torres) grows up, still in the sandy locus, the house of sand she lives in is partly of her own making.

Nevertheless, time keeps passing.  In 1919 there is an eclipse; in the Forties there is World War II aircraft in the sky.  Geological permanence in this northeastern part of Brazil contrasts with the impermanence of the human situation, with the aging of Aurea and others.  In 1969 a middle-aged Maria informs her mother that men have recently landed on the moon.  Aurea wants to know what they found there.  ‘Nothing,” Maria replies.  “I heard they just found sand.”  Along with the passage of time, then, there is the final acceptance of the women’s lot in life: really, of Aurea’s decision to remain in Maranhao when she didn’t have to, for decades.  I believe this is what Soarez is implying in the above bit of dialogue.

House of Sand has something to say, then, and the script is an essentially brilliant one.  The expert director is Andrucha Waddington, Torres’s husband and Montenegro’s son-in-law—and what gratifying performances these two women give!

House of Sand is in Portugese with English subtitles.

The 1956 crime picture, The Killer Is Loose, is standard and harsh and thoughtfully directed by Budd Boetticher.

Herein, Leon Poole (Wendell Cory), a bespectacled “loser,” robs a bank, and, hot to catch him, Detective Sam Wagner (Joseph Cotton) accidentally kills the robber’s wife.  Poole naturally hates the male aggression sometimes inflicted on him, or that he believes is inflicted on him, and it transpires that he is a sociopath.  He wants revenge on Wagner via murdering Wagner’s wife Lila (Rhonda Fleming).

At best Corey’s Poole is interesting, nothing more.  Cotton is fine with his necessary verve and a kind of odd-man-out appeal.  Fleming is a beautiful June Cleaver without kids:  she plays a middle-class wife soothingly and estimably.  Also respectable is John Larch as a man who was in the army with Poole and was insulting to him.  The Killer Is Loose is disposable but worthwhile, its camera consistently trained on the great American suburbs while uncommon pathology stands to the side.

Kyle Smith wrote a short internet piece titled “Of Course Men Aren’t Interested in Little Women.”  And why should they be?  The 2019 film, Kyle observed, “wasn’t made for men.”  Yes, and to me it’s a girly failure.  It isn’t even particularly moving.  In my view, no man should be interested in it, ever.

Woody Allen‘s Wonder Wheel (2017) is easily one of the weakest serious films I have seen.  But it is serious, for, among other things, it is about ugly neuroticism.  And there is a faint autobiographical element to it.  In certain ways a character named Mickey (Justin Timberlake) resembles Allen, and Kate Winslet‘s Ginny is a veiled Mia Farrow.  Young Carolina (Juno Temple) is the Soon-Yi Previn figure.

Personally, I have no right to suspect Allen of having sexually molested his daughter (I don’t know the man, and there was never a police arrest).  Ginny, for the record, is a shrill fool.  The film’s problems?  Although I love some of the visuals here, cinematographer Vittorio Storaro went overboard.  There is the usual sloppy and unimaginative dialogue (an aspiring dramatist, Mickey says he wants to write “great, tragic plays,” as though the postwar American theatre [the film is set in the 1950s] is interested in such a thing).  Jim Belushi goes nowhere in his enactment of an ill-developed character.  And why isn’t Carolina appalled at Ginny’s rudeness and opprobrium toward her? . . . Certifiably Wonder Wheel is not the great, tragic movie we could use in the 21st century.

Carlos (Manny Perez) is an aspiring comic-book artist living among many Latinos and some whites in New York City, a locus of crime whereby Carlos is made to face much responsibility.  That is to say, his father Eddie (Tomas Milian) gets shot and paralyzed by a robber and Carlos must care for him (temporarily) and run Eddie’s old bodega.  Exasperation besets the young Dominican as he dwells with a man–Eddie–who fails to support Carlos’s cartoonist ambitions and was often unfaithful to the dead wife he now says he loved.  What’s more, Carlos is having problems with his girlfriend and scarcely treats her properly.  Disorder grows; folly never stops.

Washington Heights (2003), by Alfredo de Villa, is small but potent.  And humane.  Villa’s Washington Heights, a section of Manhattan, is not hellish, just rough and disheartening.  Even so, the film demonstrates a failure of nerve by crafting certain troubling realities and then scurrying away from them before the credits roll.  Why, after all, does Carlos’s best friend, the white fellow played by Danny Hoch, become a thief and what happens to the guy who perpetrates violence against him?  Villa gives the whole thing short shrift.  This is very much a young man’s movie–young man-made, I mean.  There is little intellectual and artistic maturity behind it.

But it is worthy.  Perez is passable, Milian a little more than that.  I wonder about Milian’s nuances but not his passion.  Hoch is entirely true and Bobby Cannavale is forceful, even unforgettable, as a half-likable punk with money.  The DV visuals are fine, and so are Villa’s scenes of bodega business and of tension between Carlos and Maggie the Girlfriend, etc.  He’s a talented fimmaker, familiar territory in WH notwithstanding.

Washington Heights (Image via RottenTomatoes.com)