Tieta do Brasil

Entertaining movie, good story, great locations, and at 46, Sonia Braga is charming and looks GREAT! The story is good, with some scenes sticking in my mind: The helicopter dropping gifts and causing a great fight. The contrast between the two sisters. The scene at the beach with Miss Braga au natural. She looks HOT. Not many 46 year old women can look so good with no clothes at all. The prolonged fight over the installation of the factory. The various amorous alliances. This is, after all, a Brazilian movie. :-) All in all, a very entertaining couple of hours. And, yes, great music. Maybe it won't hold the interest of the average American movie goer, but for the rest of us.... we are charmed.

She's a woman who has been neglected by her family. Making some mistakes in her youth made her leave home and search a new life on her own. Later on, back in the town she was born, she finds the chance of having again her family love and though it seems to be too late, they show her it'll never be. The magic, rhythm and colur of this film is outstanding. Sonia Braga is amazing in this performance and the characters of the story are really appealing. Definitely a must-see movie.

Just as this plot portrays a big city person from San Paulo, revisiting her native small town in the brazilian Nordeste, Tornatore's character in "Star Maker" is a person from Rome visiting rural villages in Sicily. The small village dynamics are not the same as in a big city.

Sonia Braga has come full circle starring in the Jorge Amado "trilogy"...."Dona Flor", "Gabriela", and now, Tieta".....and she's at her absolute best in this funny and enchanting story of the scorned "prodical daughter" returning to her slightly backwards hometown after an absence of more than 25 years, only to find nothing much has changed.

The movie was filmed in the beautiful coastal province of Bahia, in Brazil, and combined with the rythmatic music of Caetano Veloso, and the heavenly voices of Gal Costa and Zeze Motta,[who is also in the film] it's definitely a "must see"!

Watch the begining of the film for a cameo of the great Amado himself.

Read the novel. Watch the movie. Note the world of difference. I don't care how gorgeous Sonia Braga looks, this movie isn't even the ghost of the novel on which it was based. One of the most disappointing adaptations of a fine piece of literature since Kon Ichikawa's "Enjo".