Gabriela, Cravo e Canela

Sonia Braga and Marcello Mastroianni are well-matched in this comedy set in the coastal town of Ilheus, Brazil, in the 1920's. Mastroanni is a paunchy, tired bachelor barkeeper who hires Braga, fresh out of the drought-stricken backlands, to be his cook. He is delighted to find, after she has cleaned herself up, that she is not only a terrific cook but also terrific in bed, and that she sees him as a very cute, studly young guy. But when he stubbornly tries to make their domestic arrangements into something more respectable, things start going downhill. Will our boy wise up in time?

From Jorge Amado's novel, Gabriela: Clove and Cinnamon. Music composed by Antonio Carlos Jobim and arranged by Oscar Castro-Neves. Beautiful photography by Carlo di Palma. Lots of delightful small-town character humor.

This is the role that put Sonia Braga on the map when she played it on Brazilian TV in 1975. She was a sensation, and Gabriela was one of the highest-rated novelas ever aired in Brazil.

Gabriela, Clove & Cinnamon was the novel which marked Jorge Amado's break from pure class warfare--he received several Stalin prizes in his early career!--and embrace of the joys of Brazilian humanity. Sonia Braga has starred in adaptations of three of Amado's novels, all of them magnificent (the other two are Dona Flor and Tieta). I won't say she is here at her sexiest--Sonia Braga is sexy any time she's on screen--but this is one of her best movies, helped much by the other players, among them, curiously, Marcello Mastrioanni as the Syrian immigrant who hires Gabriela as cook and quickly finds himself in a deeper relationship. The plot here involves attitudes toward women and their sexuality, an eventual welcome breakdown of the double standard. and progress of law and order in a society too often ruled by lawlessness and custom. Amado dies without getting a Nobel Prize for Literature: Gabriela and the other two films mentioned convincingly demonstrate why he should have won it.

Second film of Sonia Braga for director.Bruno Baretto, after the hit "Dona Flora and Her Two Husbands" Ms Braga carries the film, not Marcelo Mastroanni. A film that openly discusses corruption in Brazil.

There is the contrast between the Syria of Nacib's father and the Brazil of our movie's present. In Syria, barkeeper Nacib tells us, they kill and mutilate sexy women, and he declares his sympathy with that kind of treatment, but it seems that Brazil is a woman's country.

Gabriela is a fantasy of a completely unaffected, natural woman, who rises out of poverty and without education, but is completely confident of who she is with a marvelous natural grace, and is frankly open in her sexuality and lust for her employer Nacib, played by Marcello Mastroiani. But the pure femininity, I would like to call it innocence, of Sonia Braga's Gabriela, prevails. Such a character is probably only a man's fantasy, but it seems that nowhere more than Brazil would such a creature exist. And how Brazilian that not only is Gabriela, without comment, of unknown and obviously mixed race origins, but so is Nacib, who tells, after constant times of being called "Turk", that he is actually Italian, born of Syrian father and Italian mother.

Although this movie is fairly explicit sexually, it doesn't dwell on its sex scenes. It is its passion and Braga's beauty make this the sexiest mainstream flick I've seen, a heat-wave.

This was celebrated in its day. Probably most of it had to do with Sónia Braga being here.

In fact we have a combination that make the thing worthwhile: Tom Jobim and Jorge Amado. They are part of a recent creative Brazilian tradition, which consists in throwing interesting concepts into popular forms, things that people can recognize and identify to, as "pop" but which in fact is the work of intellectual creative minds. That's why we have "música popular brasileira" (brazilian 'pop' music), which contains bossa nova, which is in fact a branch fully developed by intellectual minds, with empathy for popular expressions. Jorge Amado does a similar thing with literature. He writes material that is soap-operish (and in fact was and is fully adapted into TV minor things)but at the same time works words and builds his own language, which flows on your ears as fluid as bossa nova (even if you don't understand Portuguese, try and hear it, you'll get what i mean).

These ability to be deep and popular at the same time is the biggest quality of Jobim and Amado, to me. The problem is that these minds can very easily be misunderstood, and taken for granted in what they mean, if the minds that interpret them and thin. So i admire this film, because people in it understood this. Not that this is fully achieved, on any matter. Sometimes it sounds half-baked, and the kind of explicit sexuality with no explicit sex it tries to depict is something so much explored in the last 25 years that this sounds very dated now.

Also, i don't think Braga would explode now as she did than, sexual conceptions for the Latin woman (preconcepcions)have evolved to someone who is both sensual and intellectual (Alice Braga, Sónia's niece is probably a good example). Sónia plays a rural type, she's spontaneous, has unshaved underarms, she's illiterate, she exists in the film for the sexual frictions and tensions she causes.

Well, sex is the core of Amado's writing. He chooses a close conservative environment, a kind of social still water, and throws a stone into that water (Braga). So she, through unconscious sensuality, commands the game, and moves the plot. Since they wanted to explore Sonia's effect in those days public, this is a terribly effective device (something like what is happening in a domestic scale with Soraia Chaves, in Portugal these days).

Complaints: Barreto has a good cinematic eye, and he works visually his shots and i appreciate that, but he was not sure whether he wanted to make a film about Sonia Braga and what moves around her or a film about a sensual woman in a closed village. I think he tried to mix both, and that's the failure. I'll get to his "Dona Flor...", same context, Amado and Braga as well, and see what he did there. Also, they avoided trying to explain why Gabriela, being so much in love, would screw another man, mostly being Mastroianni's best friend. We have a small clue, but it's not conclusive. It's 'just' a plot hole and i don't value that usually, but here it felt bad, it was important the insight on Gabriela.

A side note: i have a special interest in Portuguese colonial urbanism. I'm actually working right now on a final thesis on one of those cities, one of the best (ilha de Moçambique). This little city depicted (Parati, not Ilhéus) looks a good example as well, which apparently was heavily influenced by masonry in its conception. Watch the film on that matter alone, if you're interested in the theme. Some shots are really worth it.

My opinion: 3/5

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