The House of Sand/Casa de areia, a visually sumptuous realistic fantasy, is of three times: a kind of Wild West frontier in Brazil, post-Great War, and post-Neil Armstrong’s giant leap. Wildly disparate, the trio is cemented by a woman’s story -- early marriage and pregnancy, desperate motherhood, and serene old age -- and the savage sensual womanhood of real-life mother and daughter actresses Fernanda Montenegro and Fernanda Torres, who are director/co-producer Andrucha Waddinton's mother-in-law and wife, respectively. 

Elena Soárez, who also scripted the thirty-five-year-old director’s two previous, more conventionally plot-driven fictions, invented this story from an unseen photograph described as of an abandoned house on dunes. Developed around the lives of three generations of women inhabiting the rudimentary house, the story turns to the ubiquitous heavens to bring some feeling of the outside and its time-sense -- neither at ten nor at thirty-one does daughter Maria (Camilla Facundes, Fernanda Torres) have any idea of hour or month -- with the stars and later airplanes, and the singular events of a geodesic post marking the “19/05/19” total solar eclipse and the reported 1969 moon landing. Low-key use of almost non-music drowned by wind or thunderclaps furthers that unearthly Robinson Crusoe time-space isolation, interrupted only by momentary photographs and popular songs from “back home” in civilization and, finally, Chopin’s piano Prelude Opus 28, #15, “The Raindrop.”

Nor does color intrude in this color film where Director of Photography Ricardo Della Rosa’s palette is so starkly black on white that sea and sky are barely bluish and a sole second of green patch shocks. Into the middle of a nowhere so unfamiliar and whiteout that it takes moments to grasp it -- filmed with permission in buffer zones of Lençóis Maranhenses National Park -- comes a train of men, mules and supplies driven by grizzled José Vasco de Sá (Ruy Guerra), who has bought deed to what at first seem blinding white salt flats and brings in tow mother-in-law Maria (Montenegro) and pregnant wife Áurea (Torres). He will not permit the distraught women to go back, is adamant about his land rights with local descendents of runaway slaves who do not care or believe that bondage was abolished in 1888, and stubbornly brings about his own accidental death in a fit or rage.

Already abandoned by the retinue and not physically strong enough to return, mother and daughter court the help of Mr. Massu (Seu Jorge), a widower with a son in the ex-slaves’ basic fishing settlement. To abrupt, occasionally non-sequitur cuts, effective restrained chiaroscuro of the landscape, and facial expressions often illuminated from back or side only by firelight, the years pass as Áurea waits for daughter Maria to be old enough for them to leave with itinerant salt merchant Chico do Sal (Emiliano Queiroz).

Plans are thwarted, however, and, in any case, mother Maria has refused to abandon this place that now feels like home. Two days’ walk away, scientists have set up to test Einstein’s general relativity theory by measuring the bending of light during the eclipse. Áurea stumbles on their camp and into a one-nighter with camp guard Luís (Enrique Díaz), but the group decamps before she can gather her clan and rejoin them.

Suddenly it is 1942, Áurea (now Montenegro) lives with dependable Massu (now singer Luiz Melodia, in his film début), while wayward daughter Maria (now Torres) sleeps with most any available male. Warplanes fly overhead, a pilot’s corpse washes up on the beach, and now-married Air Force officer Luís (now Stênio Garcia) comes to reclaim it. Maria seduces him for her own purposes, but he will not take her home with him, until he meets her mother, his first love, who pleads that he take the young woman away, anywhere, to some sort of life.

Like her mother before her, Áurea chooses to stay here, with Massu, for it has become home and he, her family. Another abrupt cut, to twenty-seven years later, and at fifty-eight Maria drives back, bringing a cassette player, a tape of “The Raindrop,” and news of men on the moon. Metaphysical overtones that some find in The House of Sand are flimflam, consciously deflated in eighty-seven-year-old Áurea’s (Montenegro, who also is Maria in this scene) final lines. What is here, is that life is not easy, and death certain for the generations of man; but love lasts, and women are strong. 

(Released by Sony Pictures Classics and rated “R” for some graphic sexuality.)