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'Alice's House'

Rating:

Rafer GuzmÁn

January 25, 2008

For the struggling family at the heart of Chico Teixeira's modest but devastating debut feature, "Alice's House," good judgment is like a luxury item. Perhaps wealthier, happier folk can afford it, but in this gritty district of Sao Paolo it's as hard to come by as a new Discman or an honest lover.

Carla Ribas, a 35-year-old actress also making her feature debut, plays Alice, a nail-salon worker and mother of three. Her home - a cramped apartment - is plagued by problems. One son is becoming a thief, another a kind of prostitute. Her husband, meantime, has grown inexplicably cold to Alice's warm sensuality, preferring instead to dally with underage local girls. Alice's aging mother, who attends to the laundry and cooking, is going blind, but it's her misfortune to see everything around her only too clearly.

Ribas delivers a natural, earthy performance that has helped this film win numerous awards on the festival circuit. She is proud yet vulnerable, a formidable beauty who fears she's withering on the vine. It's hard to blame her for taking up with a customer's husband, but the cause isn't just loneliness; there's desire for revenge in there, and spite and envy, too. Her friends are full of bad advice, as poor in spirit as she is.

Directed in a plain, nonjudgmental style by Teixeira, a documentary filmmaker who also helped write the screenplay, "Alice's House" unfolds patiently, following every bad decision from inception to consequence. The final shot, a long, sympathetic study of Alice's careworn face, hints at an awful fate: more of the same.