Starring Carla Ribas. In Portuguese with English subtitles. Unrated. Plays Friday to Tuesday, April 11 to 15, and Monday, April 21, at the Vancity Theatre

A subtly powerful central performance by newcomer Carla Ribas as the titular apartment dweller anchors this slice-of-life portrait of a working-class family slowly falling apart.

In a dingy quarter of Sí£o Paulo, Brazil, the largest and most crowded city in South America, Alice’s three handsome sons—caught up in adolescent whims, power trips, and randy hubris—are hustling for survival just above the poverty level. Her mother (Berta Zemel) is almost too blind for housework, although she is still there to pamper the boys and give the evil eye to her indolent son-in-law. That cab-driving husband (Zé Carlos Machado) is, in fact, having it off with a neighbour, the discovery of which doesn’t seem to faze him at all.

The tale really remains about Alice, a seemingly tough-as-nails manicurist seen in all her imperfect glory. It’s as if the deus-ex-machina spa lady who kicks off The Women (“Want to try our new colour, Jungle Red?”) got her own movie and didn’t know quite what to do with it. Her gossip time at the downtown salon is both her sanctuary and her undoing, because—well, you really shouldn’t trade intimate secrets with a woman whose husband you are trying to steal while your own partner is catting around.

In the hands of writer-director Chico Teixeira, a Brazilian documentary veteran making his feature debut, nobody gets off lightly. That the characters prove so ordinary, in the end, gives the drama extra sting, even if their antics are darkly amusing—from this distance, at least. Given where they live, and the way they live, blindness isn’t such a bad option.