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The Other Side of the Street
(2004)
Dir: Marcos Bernstein
In modern American society, where aging is concerned, women get a raw deal. As men get older—at least up until the point when smelly accidents and frequent drooling take up a large part of the day—they are thought to grow sexier. More refined, wiser, more rugged, what have you. Women on the other hand are thought to peak in their twenties, and are only regarded as viable sex objects until they reach their late forties. After that, they're left with adjectives like quirky and eccentric in place of seductive, and seasoned instead of sultry. Breakthroughs in plastic surgery have extended the age at which a woman remains "hot," but the trappings of these alterations wield a slippery slope of over-indulgence and dependence. Meg Ryan, for instance, looks more like the joker than Jack Nicholson did in Batman. Plastic surgery also offers a deceptive sense of beauty. Demi Moore's relationship with her young buck probably wouldn't even be happening if she weren't part cyborg.
If a man in his fifties wants to pump partners twenty years his junior, he's a stud; if a woman tries the same, she's Blanche Devereux. It's a pretty fucking stupid double standard considering that all human beings are basically deteriorating bags of puss, blood and shit, but it's not that surprising a double standard either. Particularly for a patriarchal society that still can't come to grips with a (filthy!) televised titty.
Although The Other Side of the Street doesn't directly address any of the above themes, the love story at it's core effectively tangos with septuagenarian sexuality in a way that no Hollywood film would even consider. Regina (Fernanda Montenegro) is a lonely old woman living in the Copacabana district of Rio de Janeiro. Not one to sit on the beach and knit her twilight days away, she works as an informant for the police, helping to bust up prostitution rings and such. This work gives her a sense of usefulness, but it has begun to dominate her psyche. When she spies a man in a building across the street injecting his wife with what appears to be poison, she immediately calls her contact at the department. The man, it turns out, is a retired judge, and the police do nothing about the case, so
Regina decides to investigate him on her own. She courts him and as their relationship blossoms, she is forced to rethink both her opinion of him and her motives in perusing him.
The dominant theme in this movie is an older woman's search for a sense of purpose and self as her youth becomes more and more a memory. Montenegro is a well-known television and stage actress in Brazil (she also starred in Central Station, a movie which Bernstein wrote—The Other Side of the Street is his directorial debut). Her breasts sag and skin is wrinkled, but her screen presence has a very distinct and powerful sexuality. Most of it stems from the fact that she seems confident in who she is. Regina still puts on lipstick before going out and she struts as she walks down a crowded sidewalk. At one point she tries to stave off her lovers advances by telling him that her body is a sea of stretch marks. She makes no excuses for her age. Her frankness has an assertive power and she operates outside the arena of self-doubt that is typically wrought through obsessive worship of young flesh. There's an integral apart of her that remains vivacious, a part that no scalpel or Botox injection could ever reach.
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