“House of Sand,” by the Brazilian director Andrucha Waddington from a screenplay by Elena Soárez, is a woman’s picture set in a masculine — indeed, a heroic — landscape that dwarfs the men and animals making their painful way across it in the opening scenes.

What we see are the wild and desolate sand flats and dunes of the Maranhao state in Brazil’s equatorial North, on the pounding Atlantic. It is 1910 and the little band arriving from somewhere far in the South must have traveled more than 2,000 miles by foot and donkey to get there. Obviously, they haven’t come all that way for nothing.

But it’s different for the women. The restless, ambitious, exploring men may be pursuing a grand and noble dream, but the women have come because they had to. The men endure hardship for the sake of winning or achieving something; the women simply endure. The film’s contempt for the men’s ambitions, as for all masculine striving, is expressed by its lack of interest in any narrative involvement in those ambitions.

The leader of the party, an old man named Vasco de Sá (Ruy Guerra), claims to have “bought” his young wife, Áurea (Fernanda Torres), by paying her debts.This is what he imagines has given him the right to bring her and her mother, Donna Maria (Fernanda Montenegro), along with some hired men to this god-forsaken place, inhabited only by runaway slaves who, though slavery has been abolished, don’t trust the law for their freedom.

At least they could run away. Áurea and her mother, the de facto slaves of Vasco, are desperate to escape, but Áurea’s pregnancy makes it impossible. She pleads with Vasco to be allowed to return whither they have come, but he turns a deaf ear.

With materials supplied by the slaves, especially Massu (Seu Jorge), Vasco builds a ramshackle house on the sand and drags and pushes Áurea inside when she refuses to enter it.When his hired men run off, Vasco swears he doesn’t need anybody, but he is killed in the collapse of part of the house he has built on the shifting sands — a motif to be repeated — and the women are left alone.

Massu warns them: “Your house will sink.”

“We’re not staying here,” Áurea insists.

“Neither is the sand,” says Massu. “It sweeps everything away.”

But they are staying, in spite of Áurea’s hatred for the place, and the film uses the impermanence of the landscape, as of masculine ambition, to contrast with the iconic permanence of womankind.

At first they still expect to leave one day. When Áurea’s daughter, Maria (Camilla Facundes), is old enough to make the journey, her grandmother, who has lived on the desolate coast for nearly 10 years, now says she wants to stay. “I don’t miss it anymore,” she says of the city that Áurea so longs for. “I like it here; I have no man telling me what to do.”

The paradox of their having come to this place because of some man telling them what to do and then staying because of the relative freedom it affords them lies at the heart of the film, which is well made and visually impressive. Its chief virtue lies in the performances of the real-life mother and daughter, Ms. Montenegro and Ms. Torres, who are also the real-life mother-in-law and wife of Mr. Waddington.

He has sought to create a sense of epic sweep by making the time-span of the film cover three generations and 60 years. Halfway through, Ms. Montenegro takes the part of the now-aged Áurea and Ms. Torres that of her daughter, Maria.

It’s a remarkable transformation, as there is constant tension between the mothers and daughters, who all have distinctive personalities, but it is also a way of suggesting continuity and geologic permanence.

The passage of time is marked by events in the sky. An eclipse in 1919 brings scientists to the northeast coast of Brazil to prove Einstein’s theory and Áurea misses a last chance to get away. Years later, a flight of World War II-era aircraft tells us we have arrived at 1942, when Maria, now grown, escapes to the city, leaving her mother behind. Finally, the middle-aged Maria returns in 1969 to find the now-aged Áurea still living between the sand and the sea, and tells her that a man has landed on the moon.

“What did he find on the moon?”

“Nothing,” Maria answers. “Nothing. I heard he just found sand.”

Not a lot happens in this movie. Or, rather, one is constantly aware of all that is happening offstage while the unchanging sand and sea and sky where the women live create, with them, a rebuke to the ambitions and pretensions of men. When Áurea meets Luiz (Enrique Díaz), the military escort of the scientists in 1919, he tells her, as if expecting her to be excited, that the war is over.

“I didn’t know it had started,” she says to him.

“It lasted for four years,” he says.

“And I have been here for ten, I think.”

Einsteinian relativity has nothing on these contrasting views of time and timelessness.The hint seems to be that men are concerned with history and the historic while women inhabit a kind of timeless eternal present — even if that experience is profoundly against their will.

It’s a compelling vision, but it doesn’t leave much room for love or wisdom or goodness or sacrifice. Presumably in the vast sidereal distances apparent here under “the best sky in the world,” such things are of no more moment than human achievement.

jbowman@nysun.com