Art House Brazil

A Deriva (Adrift) (2009)
Directed by: Heitor Dhalia
Starring: Vincent Cassel, Camilla Belle, Debora Bloch


A Deriva is the latest in a slew of high-minded movies coming out of Brazil. What was once a nation that seemed to be identified with nothing but Chiquita Bananas and the samba, has produced one challenging and intelligent movie after another. Starting with Central Station (1998), followed by Behind the Sun (2001), and finally the infamous City of God, Brazil has become the powerhouse in Latin American cinema. These movies almost entirely focus on the poor and forgotten parts of Brazil, as if these directors were hoping to erase the image of shimmering beaches and women in bikinis and paint over it a mural of poverty, crime, and dilapidation. A Deriva strives to take a different angle from these movies; it attempts to show the trappings of upper class life during the end of the period of military dictatorship in Brazil. While it succeeds on some levels, the movie falls flat in others.
At its core, A Deriva is a tale of a family torn apart by marital infidelity by the patriarch of the family (Vincent Cassel). This infidelity is witnessed by the protagonist, the fifteen-year-old Fillipa, who is coming of age while the family spends a summer in the posh beach resort town of Buzios. What follows are a string of wonderful performances, an interesting and very adult look at what marital infidelity and marriage can mean, and one painfully flat performance by the object of the father’s affection.
The movie is held together by Vincent Cassel. There is no other way to phrase it. He is the beating heart of this movie and gives one of his best performances since La Haine (1995), a performance that is all the more spectacular realizing that he is speaking in his non-native Portuguese. The supporting cast gives admiral performances as well, Laura Neiva as Fillipa, Debora Bloch as Clarice the mother, and the other actors give good performances. However, when it comes to Angela, the young woman with whom the father is having an affair, the story falls flat. Camilla Belle spends most of the film walking around looking like the Carmen Miranda character from Looney Tunes cartoons. Rather than being a seductive figure, something that could attract as much scorn as she does during the course of the movie, she comes off as lost and silly. If not for the performances by Cassel and Bloch, the movie would fall apart the minute that Anglea is first seen by Fillipa. Thankfully, it does not.
Buzios is a beautiful beach town. It is a town infamous amongst the elite of Brazil for a reason and when Ricardo Della Rosa is a given a chance, he photographs the scenes beautifully. Unfortunately, the sections of the movie where he is not allowed to do so bring to mind a quote from Billy Wilder:“ Shoot a few scenes out of focus. I want to win the foreign film award.” Mr. Dhalia has written a very mature, very adult, very interesting screenplay about coming of age and witnessing a broken marriage. Better yet, he has the ability to look further into how two adults deal with and try to manage a marriage. Unfortunately, he tries too hard to let us know that he is doing that, throwing the camera around in random flashes of hand-held, out of focus blues and greens.
A Deriva is a terrific change from what has been the general fare to reach our shores from Brazil. It is well thought-out, well directed, and by and large well-acted. If only the director could have been comfortable enough with the film he produced to avoid the trappings of a less-confident director and left the camera where it belongs, on the story at hand.