Recommended

Maria and Áurea are brought out among the dunes by Áurea's brutish, much older husband, Vasco (Ruy Guerra). The year is given as 1910, but there is little to mark it beyond the fact that their few possessions have been brought by donkey. No doubt Vasco considers himself on the verge of something new and exciting, grasping a deed that says he owns these wind-swept expanses, but he and his small band of hired help are met by a clutch of freed slaves, led by the imposing Massu (Seu Jorge), who warns that they had better clear off, deed or no deed.

AGE BEFORE BEAUTY: Fernanda Montenegro in House of Sand.

Stubborn but not blind, Vasco trades his donkeys and his pistol for the makings of a house, but after his helpers clear off, he furiously attacks his unstable dwelling, which promptly collapses and kills him. Lost and left to their own devices, the women plot their escape, but Áurea is pregnant, and so they must wait.

A few seconds later, it's 1919, and the women haven't moved. The corral outside their house, now partly swallowed by an encroaching dune, is filled with livestock, and Áurea has a curly-haired daughter, Maria (Camilla Facundes), but otherwise, little seems to have changed. Áurea is still desperate to find her way back to the city, but opportunities seem to have been few in the intervening years. At last, she happens upon a soldier (Enrique Diáz) who has come to the desert in the company of a group of scientists hoping to prove that space is curved. He explains to her Einstein's notion that if one twin were sent into space while the other stayed on Earth, the first would age almost imperceptibly while the other grew old. "I would hate to be the one who stayed," Áurea responds.

Eventually, Áurea does come face to face with a twin of sorts, although it seems a shame to reveal how, since the movie's abrupt, purposefully disorienting temporal leaps are part of the fun. And it is fun, even though the movie's tone is sober, even portentous at times. It's not clear if Waddington or his screenwriter Elena Soárez intend the movie as a grand statement on some theme or other, but it comes off as an unfinished symphony, its themes — the passage of time, the mother-daughter bond — established but not elaborated upon. Nowhere near as exacting as Hiroshi Teshigahara's 1964 Woman in the Dunes, from which it unavoidably cribs some of its imagery, House of Sand is a pleasantly thoughtful diversion that's probably more enjoyable than it intends to be.

(sam@citypaper.net)

House of Sand
Directed by Andrucha Waddington
A Sony Classocs release
Opens Friday at Ritz Bourse