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Susan Granger's review of "BOSSA NOVA" (Sony Pictures Classics)
Brazilian writer/director Bruno Barreto and his wife, actress Amy Irving, have concocted a mid-life romance set in exotic Rio de Janeiro. In the screenplay by Alexandre Machado and Fernanda Young, based on Sergio Sant'Anna's novel, "Miss Simpson," Irving plays an enigmatic widow, a retired flight attendant, whose Brazilian airline pilot husband drowned two years earlier. While teaching English, she's romanced by two suitors: a randy soccer player (Alexandre Borges) and a lawyer (Antonio Fagundes) whose wife (Debora Bloch) left him for a tai chi instructor (Kazuo Matsui). Meanwhile, the lawyer's half-brother (Pedro Cardoso) falls for a sexy legal intern (Giovanna Antonelli) who, in turn, develops a crush on the soccer star. One of Irving's students (Drica Moraes) has fallen for a New Yorker (Stephen Tobolowsky) in a chat room on the Internet. To add to the tropical turbulence, the language school in which Irving teaches is housed in the same building where the lawyer's father (Alberto De Mendoza) is trying to maintain his tailor shop after his latest wife split. All of this interconnected drama pulsates to the beat of Antonio Carlos Jobim's bossa nova classics. While it's sumptuously photographed by Pascal Rabaud, it should be paced like a screwball romantic farce, complete with mistaken identities and comedic confusion, but, unfortunately, at times it's somewhat stilted. On the other hand, I was entranced by a fantasy in which Fagundes imagines himself as a '40s Fred Astaire, romancing Irving's Ginger Rogers - and an elevator scene as he surreptitiously measures her for a garment. On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, "Bossa Nova" is a bittersweet, sensuous 7. In Portuguese with English subtitles, it's a movie that makes you want to call your travel agent.
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