Central Station screenwriter Marcos Bernstein makes his directorial debut with The Other Side Of The Street, another Fernanda Montenegro vehicle that again casts the veteran Brazilian actress as a lonely old crank who accidentally finds a companion. This time it's a retired judge (Raul Cortez), who lives in the apartment complex across the street. Montenegro spends her days spying for the police force as part of the "senior service," providing tips on neighborhood drug and prostitution rings. When she thinks she sees Cortez injecting his wife with poison, the cops aren't interested, so Montenegro decides to investigate on her own. She cozies up to Cortez, gradually sparking a December-December romance.
Montenegro's performance is typically multifaceted, displaying keen wit and a thick streak of self-doubt. At one point, she foils a would-be bank robber, but nobody seems to care, prompting her to wonder if she really has a nose for crime, or if she's just so desperate for a puzzle to solve that she's begun inventing them. Bernstein doesn't really examine the question with much subtlety. He establishes Montenegro's loneliness early on by having her son bluntly ask, "Is it better to be alone, like you?" And after the 10th static shot of Montenegro sitting in her empty apartment while plaintive piano music plays, viewers may feel the point has been made.
Still, though it's slower than a little red wagon and just about as inelegant, The Other Side Of The Street has a kind of quiet dignity to its storytelling. It's a little richer than it initially seems. Central Station was a crowd-pleasing road picture, but beneath the surface, it was about the struggle to maintain faith while waiting for Jesus. (Literally—the movie had a character named Jesus whom everyone was waiting for.) The Other Side Of The Street is partly about how the elderly keep from feeling useless and alone, but it's also about the responsibility an older generation takes for the world they're about to leave. At the start of the film, Montenegro walks her dog on the beach and gets flummoxed when she can't figure out which of the scattered turds in the sand she's supposed to clean up. With only the slightest hesitation, she heaves a heavy sigh and stoops over to pick up each of them, one by one.