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BOSSA NOVA Send This Review to a Friend
Brazil, music, love, confusion, comedy, and even the internet. It's all there in Bruno Barreto's delightful new "Bossa Nova," a joyful entertainment populated by an amusing assortment of characters, a colorful cast, a busy plot with plenty of romantic complications, accompanied by the rhythms and melodies of a Tom Jobin soundtrack. There are soap opera moments, but the film generates so much good will that one can forgive the odd imperfections. What's more, the most appealing male romantic figure is a middle-aged man far from the customary leading man type, definitely a plus for adult moviegoers.
Antonio Fagundes has charm to spare as Pedro Paulo, a Rio lawyer whose marriage is on the rocks. His father (Alberto de Mendoza) is a tailor, whose business happens to be in the same building as an English school where Mary Ann Simpson (Amy Irving) teaches. Mary Ann, who used to be a flight attendant, is the widow of a Brazilian pilot, and withdrawn into her teaching, she is not counting on being swept off her feet. But what about intelligent attraction and chemistry? Irving gets increasingly effective as an actress, and she is lovely in this role, to which she brings warmth, maturity and beauty.
You practically need a scorecard to keep track of everyone in the film. There are Pedro's estranged wife Tania (Debora Bloch), now smitten with Wan-Kim-Lau, a Tai-Chi-Chuan teacher (Kazuo Matsui); Mary's romance-hungry student Nadine (Drica Moraes), who thinks she has found her dreamboat on the internet and awaits meeting him; another student and the source of great humor, soccer star Acacio (Alexandre Borges), who has been sold to an English soccer team, much to the anger of Brazilian fans, and Pedro's brother Roberto (Pedro Cardoso), on whom law intern Sharon (Giovanna Antonelli) has a crush.
The trick in a film like this is to bring the various lives together in convincing, inventively entertaining ways, and this is accomplished handily in the screenplay by Alexandre Machado and Fernanda Young, based loosely on the novel "Miss Simpson" by Sergio Sant'Anna. Director Barreto often applies his talent to weightier scripts, but with "Bossa Nova" he luxuriates in a light, breezy style. He also is savvy enough to make magical Rio de Janeiro a full-fledged character, with ample help from director of photography Pascal Rabaud. A Sony Pictures Classics release.
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