Tones of Home

New DVDs of the Carax/Gondry/Bong trifecta "Tokyo!" and Brazilian character study "Alice's House."

Chico Teixeira’s “Alice’s House” (2007) takes a bead on lower-class Brazilian culture, as a noisy lowland where men indulge their neurotic whims and women stand by and pay the price. Or decide not to: Alice (Carla Ribas) is a middle-aged but still saucy mother of three post-adolescent boys and wife to a negligent and hardly working cab driver, and as her bitter existence is structured around the subsistence of others, the appearance of an old boyfriend sends her teetering.

Typically, Teixeira’s movie has plenty of panache and gritty handheld naturalism, and Ribas (a collector of Best Actress prizes by now) is grounded and dead real. But the film starts to emerge from its cluttered import film ghetto when you begin to sense the pathologies at work — everybody in the family harbors secrets, everybody’s jockeying for power, the crowded São Paulo flat is a veritable layer cake of hidden and stolen objects (in a culture swarming with totems, potions and idols), where the grandmother sees it all and says nothing, and the whole cauldron could explode in any one of a half-dozen ways, and so on. There’s a measure of sleight-of-hand used here, and Teixeira returns to set-pieces — tense dinners where nothing is said, laundry-doing where incriminating residues are constantly uncovered — so often they emerge as signs of meaning, not plot.

“Tokyo!” (Liberation Entertainment) and “Alice’s House” (IndiePix) are now available on DVD.

Pages: 1 2