Exceptional Family Drama and Lesbian Romance Mars One Fights for Kindness
“Did you know the sun we’re seeing now is the sun of the past?” In writer-director Gabriel Martin’s sensitive, sincere family drama Marte Um (Mars One), teenage Deivinho (Cícero Lucas) makes this nerdy observation to two friends who are more interested in playing chicken than indulging Devinho’s closeted obsession with astrophysics. It’s one of many fervent thoughts that stands as a representation of Deivinho’s setting: Brazil on the night of Jair Bolsnaro’s presidential win and subsequent installation. The audience already knows that things are about to get materially worse for a working class family like Deivinho’s, and even though the film is grounded in 2018’s relatively recent reality, watching their bad luck unfold sometimes feels like a prophetic dream.
Joining Deivinho as the film’s center are his near-college-graduate sister Eunice (Camilla Damião), janitor father Wellington (Carlos Francisco), and part-time housekeeper mother Tércia (Rejane Faria). The foursome are the main solar system of the film, and Martin does an impressive job of fully developing each character so that their conflicts, closeness, and resolutions all feel integral and earned.
A promising youth soccer player, Deivinho hides his true love of space and his yearning to board the 2030 mission to colonize Mars from his family, unsure of how to approach his soccer star-worshipping father with his change in career plans. Eunice, herself hiding her budding lesbian identity and her new girlfriend Joana (Ana Hilãrio), longs for a space of her own—one in which she won’t end up catering to the men in her life. Tércia, whom Eunice regards as too soft on her husband and son, struggles to overcome insomnia and a string of traumatizing coincidences that convince her she’s attracting her own bad luck. Wellington, the most willfully ignorant of the central players, is a four-years sober alcoholic who refuses to recognize his own exploitation at the hands of his wealthy bosses, instead holding out for his son’s eventual ascension to soccer stardom as a means to uplift the whole family.
It’s a pleasure to spend time with each character individually, both on the basis of their writing and performance. Thanks to Martin’s patient shot length, immersive instinct, and expressionist lighting, viewers get to experience the often reserved, always naturalistic reactions of each family member as if from a fully formed person that we’ve known for far longer than the film’s generous 115-minute runtime. The viewer is allowed into the everyday trials that the rest of the family aren’t able to experience, lending a benevolence and graciousness to each character’s flawed attempts to love each other while still standing their ground. Even if we don’t agree with each character’s choices, Martins presents the chance to really listen to and understand what they’re saying with or without speaking a word.