Some stories, Teixeira is wise enough to realize, are best left unadorned.
Alice's House (2007)
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Reviews Counted:30
Fresh:27
Rotten:3
Average Rating:6.8/10
Consensus: Chico Teixeira's steady hand and unblinking, sympathetic eye -- along with Carla Ribas' breathtaking performance -- make this portrait of working-class Brazilian life extraordinary.
Theatrical Release:Jan 25, 2008 Limited
Synopsis: Brazilian documentary filmmaker Chico Teixeira brings a refreshingly natural touch to ALICE'S HOUSE, a working class drama about personal and family betrayal. Forty-ish manicurist Alice (Carla... Brazilian documentary filmmaker Chico Teixeira brings a refreshingly natural touch to ALICE'S HOUSE, a working class drama about personal and family betrayal. Forty-ish manicurist Alice (Carla Ribas) works long hours at the beauty parlor, only to return to a cramped Sao Paulo apartment she inhabits with her brutish husband Lindomar (Zecarlos Machado), three disrespectful sons, and her ailing mother. Struggling daily against such densely packed machismo, Alice is blind to the secrets simmering beneath her family's mundane existence. This includes her eldest son turning tricks with older men and her husband's affairs with teenage girls. Alice is soon drawn into her own web of infidelity by the reappearance of an old high school flame. As truths finally boil to the surface Alice must choose between a painful new reality and her desperate romantic hopes. Unlike the urban violence of recent Brazilian successes (CITY OF GOD, BUS 174), ALICE'S HOUSE is a quietly moving, warts-and-all observation of love, sex, and deception. Director Teixeira employs an intimate, true-to-life style that puts the film's focus squarely on the mercurial emotions and loyalties of its characters. Lauded throughout Latin America, ALICE'S HOUSE reveals how pride isolates a family from itself, and that only truth can lead you back on the road to healing. [More]
Starring: Carla Ribas, Vinicius Zinn, Ricardo Vilaça, Felipe Massuia
Starring: Carla Ribas, Vinicius Zinn, Ricardo Vilaça, Felipe Massuia, Berta Zemel, Zécarlos Machado, Luciano Quirino
Director: Chico Teixeira
Director: Chico Teixeira
Screenwriter: Chico Teixeira, Julio Pessoa, Sabina Anzuategui, Marcelo Gomes
Producer: Patrick Leblanc
Studio: Vitagraph Films
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Reviews for Alice's House
What lingers after watching Alice's House are not the moments of conflict but the inexorable rhythms of daily life.
Chico Teixeira's languid, libidinous Alice's House is the best argument against marriage and motherhood to appear in many a year.
Free of the usual social pathology, intimate dysfunction proves more than capable of holding our interest, as it would anywhere.
A Brazilian slice-of-life drama set in a working-class household where a disappointed woman undergoes a midlife meltdown.
Documaker Chico Teixeira gives a light, natural feel to his small but fetching first feature, set in a working class household in Sao Paulo that gets turned upside down by everyday dramas of sexual and emotional betrayal.
Despite all the crises brewing in this family, we never feel there's anything at stake.
Ribas delivers a natural, earthy performance that has helped this film win numerous awards on the festival circuit.
Alice's House is an utterly average foreign art-house film, with all the strengths and flaws that label implies.
The sense of realism Chico Teixeira brings to his first feature-length fiction is fussy and unilluminative of character when it should be spontaneous.
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January 24, 2008:
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