Flores raras

Bruno Barreto (2013)

In the opening scene of Reaching for the Moon, an account of Elizabeth Bishop’s relationship with Lota de Macedo Soares, Bishop sits on a bench in Central Park with Robert Lowell and reads to him the first six lines of ‘One Art’.  Lowell is surprised there’s no more to the poem, which he criticises as a series of ‘observations, divided into lines’.  He tells Bishop she’s ended it just at the point at which it should take off.  ‘One Art’ is perhaps Elizabeth Bishop’s best-known poem; any viewer who has a nodding acquaintance with her work knows immediately that this movie will end with her reading Lowell the final version of the poem – which the searing, searching experience of her life with Lota has enabled Elizabeth to complete.   And so it does.  As the titles came up, there were snuffles then applause from the rows behind in NFT1.  (Reaching for the Moon was showing at the LGBT festival, renamed this year as ‘Flare’.)   The combination was apt:  Bruno Barreta’s film seems designed to move its audience to tears and to make us feel culturally pleased with ourselves.

If Elizabeth Bishop had been a pop singer the conventionality of the plotting and the choice of scenes through which Barreto tells his story would be not only plain to see but probably derided.  I think these shortcomings will be submerged for many people by the cultural cachet of the protagonist.  This is A Late Quartet syndrome:  although his movie is less bad than Yaron Zilberman’s, Barreto gives himself away even in the legends on the screen that precede the closing credits.  The first two are quotes:  Lowell’s sexist judgment that ‘Few women write major poetry. . . . Only four stand with our best men:  Emily Dickinson, Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop and Sylvia Plath’; and Bishop’s tart response in a letter to him:  ‘I’d rather be called “the 16th poet” with no reference to my sex, than one of four women—even if the other three are pretty good’.  Barreto detracts from this witty rejoinder with a bald, pompous, unattributed statement that Bishop is ‘now recognised as one of the most important poets in the English language’.  Even so, Bishop’s poems, or snatches of lines from them, are voiced in the narrative in the way that greatest hits are likely to be in a biopic of a singing star – apposite to the dramatic moment.  And she’s presented as a stereotypical screen writer – she chain smokes, sitting at her typewriter or pacing raptly up and down, trying to think of the next phrase.  When the words come they appear on screen as determined dark incursions on the blank sheet of paper.

Although the last decade has seen at least one good picture (Bright Star) and another structurally imaginative one (Howl) about poets, they’re not the easiest group of artists to bring to life on film – perhaps because poetry isn’t essentially either a visual or a performing art (although it’s obviously performable).  If a film-maker approaches a poet subject with cautious reverence, the results can be disastrous – as in Christine Jeffs’s Sylvia (2003):  Sylvia Plath’s biography might seem tailor-made for melodrama but Jeffs diluted the ‘blood jet’ of Plath’s life and death into something improbably watery (yet still clichéd).  That, at least, isn’t what happens in Reaching for the Moon.  Barreto’s approach is carefully admiring but at least there’s a contrast between his treatment and the somewhat trashy screenplay.  According to the credits, this is a reworking by Matthew Chapman and Julie Sayres of a script by Carolina Kotscho, based on a novel by Carmen L Oliveira called Flores raras e banalíssimas.

Just as Elizabeth Bishop’s stature as a writer is assumed to confer depth on the material so her sexuality is meant to make the film’s tragic love story ‘different’ but the trajectory of her affair with the Brazilian architect Lota de Macedo Soares is, in a biopic context, anything but unusual:  the pair (a) don’t get on at first then (b) fall madly in love until (c) professional success and preoccupations cause tensions and physical separation and eventual tragedy.   The characters are by no means fully developed.  Bishop is a strait-laced alcoholic, Macedo Soares a straight-talking bohemian.  The former has come to Brazil to stay (and, she hopes, cure her writer’s block) at the Samambaia estate near Petropolis – where Mary Morse, a friend from Bishop’s Vassar days, shares her home and life with Lota.  Elizabeth, watching through the window as Lota and Mary horse about outside, impulsively bites into a piece of fruit from the bowl on the breakfast table.  A food allergy lands her in hospital and extends her visit.  Barreto and the screenwriters don’t really explain, though, what makes Elizabeth loosen up a bit and become less of a pain in the neck, indeed irresistible to Lota.  (The Bishop described in the early stages would more likely have felt that the food poisoning was a warning not to let herself go.)  The mutual infatuation doesn’t come over as meant to be, so much as required by movie formula.

The Australian actress Miranda Otto, with her neat features and porcelain complexion, doesn’t much resemble Elizabeth Bishop (not the older Bishop anyway).  What seems important to Bruno Barreto, perhaps because of the shallowness of the characters as written, is a strong physical contrast between Elizabeth and Lota.  He certainly achieves that with Otto and Glória Pires, a star of Brazilian telenovelas.  Miranda Otto’s acting is intelligent but too obviously thought out and Bishop is presented throughout as a chilly, unpleasant woman.  Glória Pires’s Lota is not only more likeable but also more emotionally convincing – Pires makes the gradual dimming of Lota’s self-confidence affecting (this occurs in spite of her success as the chief creative designer of the Flamengo Park in Rio de Janeiro).  While the doomed love story is structurally familiar, the Samambaia ménage, once Lota begins her affair with Elizabeth, is unusual:  Mary Morse stays there and adopts the child she longs for.  Although Tracy Middendorf, who plays Mary, is only three years Miranda Otto’s junior, she looks a generation younger; and although the film spans the years 1951 to 1967, Mary never seems to age.  (Thanks to a facial resemblance, the character’s name and the fact that she spends much of the time looking tearful and aggrieved, Tracy Middendorf rather unfortunately recalls Mary Decker at the Los Angeles Olympics.)  Robert Lowell may have been a chauvinist but Treat Williams insultingly turns him into a figure who is not just paternalist but complacent.  The best things in Reaching for the Moon are the lushly appealing score by Marcelo Zarvos and the cinematography by Mauro Pinheiro Jr, whose images of the Brazilian landscape are expressive enough to suggest a poet’s eye and interpretation of its shapes and colours.

29 March 2014