On Shame, Affect and the (Aging) Female Body in "Aquarius" (2016)

• In Event: Approaching Aging (Women) in Recent Latin American Cinema

Abstract

Since its unforgettable Cannes premiere where the cast declared “Brazil experienced a coup,” Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Aquarius has fascinated critics and audiences. Yet, absent from discussions about cinematic soft power and Recife gentrification is an analysis of the tour-de-force main character, Clara (Sonia Braga), a retired music critic and cancer survivor.

Clara’s body is a site of paradox, what Massumi (2002) calls “the virtual,” or “a lived paradox where what are normally opposites coexist, coalesce and connect” (30). Clara is at once old and young (beautiful, desirable and sexual), gesturing toward a fluid construction of age. Moreover, she is prideful and filled with shame. Ahmed (2015) describes the experience of shame as “the affective cost of not following the scripts of normative existence” (107). Clara’s shame originates from her deviation from two “binding” societal “ideals”: first, opting out of breast reconstruction after a single mastectomy in the 1980s, and second, refusing to move out of her condo, which would effectively define her as ‘old.’ These choices affect Clara as she wrestles with the “cost” of non-normative existence, i.e. her discomfort with sexual relationships and -harsh criticism she receives for rejecting the (patriarchal) developers’ offers to buy her condo. Ultimately, while Clara’s body calls into question collective Brazilian shame about certain (aging, racialized) bodies, a force feeding into Brazil’s regime of “beauty biopolitics” and obsession with plastic surgery (Jarrín 2017), Aquarius’s affective radicality is curbed by the star behind Clara: a beautiful, ‘ageless’ actress whose body is known to be normative.

Author

• Olivia Cosentino, Ohio State University