Not to be confused with the delightful Australian film of three summers ago, THREE SUMMERS (TRES VEROES) waxes Brazilian over the winter of discontent of a bunch of domestics when their employer makes an inglorious runner making them all gawp.
THREE SUMMERS is an examination of what happens to the invisible people living in the orbit of the rich and powerful when everything collapses. Through their gaze, we witness the gradual disintegration of Brazil in the three years leading to 2018, the year the present President of Brazil, Bolsonaro, was elected. This former army captain never made colonel, but he is certainly the kernel of a Brazil nut.
As such, we watch THREE SUMMERS as an allegory and a satire, as it charts the progressive chronology of a working-class rebellion, spearheaded by a charismatic domestic employee whose constant yet feigned state of happiness belies a great personal trauma.
Regina Case plays the redoubtable Mada, the sunshine superwoman of THREE SUMMERS, salt of the earth employee to peppered with impropriety employers. Her loyalty to her patrons is only matched by the fidelity to her peers.
Keen to set up her own kiosk, you just know she would be an empathetic boss, and the predicament her fraudulent employers have left her bring her entrepreneurial elan to the fore.
The abandoned summer house vacated by the fugitive capitalists is capitalised by Mada as an Air B&B, a luxury location for the shooting of a prestige commercial, and the yacht in the marina is launched as a tourist attraction.
Unlike her unscrupulous employers, Mada runs the enterprise as a collective, making sure staff stiffed by the fugitives receive their fair share of the profits.
Economic inequity and corruption are certainly in the cross hairs of director Sandra Kogut and her aim, for the most part, is true.
A personal reveal towards the end though does not seem truthful, bordering on sententious, or over sentimentalised to say the least.
