Some films leave you physically altered; the catharsis they serve up is more than just lights playing on a wall. It is physical, possibly chemical. When the screen goes dark and house lights rise again, the shadow play just witnessed has taken a toll, a real one. Whatever the journey, the actors have mimicked it effectively enough that you feel as though you too have come through changed.
House of Sand overwhelms from the first frame — a harsh white mountain of sand and then just a tiny black spot of a man. He is dwarfed. In front of such hostile nature we are dwarfed. The wind wraps his voice in sand and blows it away. A caravan plods across the dune, each step a struggle against the shifting earth. The wind erases their tracks as they move. It is not difficult to understand what is temporary in this landscape.
Then water. Vasco has reached the tiny lagoon he has purchased for himself, his beautiful young wife Aurea (Fernanda Torres) and her mother Doña Maria (Fernanda Montenegro). The two women are unhinged at the prospect of scratching out an existence in so hostile an environment. Then Vasco collapses and the women must fend for themselves, relying on a nearby colony of escaped slaves to show them the way.
Aurea gives birth to a daughter, Maria, and spends the next decade waiting for the child to grow. Aurea believes she will escape her desert exile when Maria is old enough to cross the desert safely. The life she leads in the intervening years is a struggle with nature, a stripping away of the trappings of civilization, but not of the civilized.
House of Sand follows Aurea as she plods through the shifting sands of her life, her footsteps disappearing as she advances. Through most of her adulthood Aurea stubbornly pursues both survival and escape. The more she makes a life in the sand, the more determined she seems to leave it, holding tightly to a dream of a world she has long since lost. Music. The wonders of technological achievement. Time passes. Man steps foot on the moon, but what does he find?
