Reaching for the Moon

This is a beautifully filmed movie about the lives of two exceptional women whose lives collided in the early 50s and went on for 17 years. Oh - it's a true story, BTW.

The locations are spectacular in a quiet way and worth the watch on their own. They added one star.

I am ashamed to say I was not aware of Elizabeth Bishop. Now I am looking forward to reading her material.

Hope you enjoy this film.

Reaching for the Moon (2013)

Wonderful! The story of the Brazilian years of the great North American poet, Elizabeth Bishop. There are so many beautiful aspects to the characters, their setting, and their relationships it's hard to know where to begin. And even better, on top of all this, is the historical recreation of the times, and the changing political climate of Brazil. It's touching and uplifting and tragic.

The original title of this is "Flores Raras" because these were indeed rare people, and doing beautiful things. And yes, they were reaching for the moon but you might rather say they reached the moon. Succeeding at something is more than literally fulfilling.

The plot has a slightly meandering, unfamiliar arc through the main events, and there are times when you think one thing and then suddenly another happens. Don't blame bad writing, but rather realize that this is how life is, and how it really was. Remember as well that these are artists of privilege at work, they have money and education and act with a kind of license and liberation that we all should feel. And so it's unpredictable.

As a kind of true insight into the poetic process you might find few parallels in the movies. You learn their temperaments, and how circumstances make the artist and the poet come to their best. The intimate circumstances are about love, a really true deep love that grows between these two women. Their professional needs reinforce and conflict with their personal needs, but they make it work.

The outside circumstances are hard to understand from 2014. Brazil was once a very different country, filled with far more freedom and sense of liberation. (This seems to be a direction that are pointed in again, though going through fits and starts.) But the world in post-War Brazil was one of possibility. It was a haven (not just for ex-Nazis) and a growing "New World," but it was also stuffed with poverty (which the movie ignores), a legacy still at hand.

And this is exciting stuff. The movie moves mostly through the confines of their big, gorgeous estate in the hills, but it also shows us the city, and the larger world. So Bishop and Lota de Macedo Soares, an important architect of the era. grow and suffer and see their world fall apart around them (Brazil fell under dictatorship in the mid 1960s). It's filmed with utter beauty, the acting is sharp and convincing, and the writing (not surprisingly) is fluid and tight. Great stuff.

The Brazilian movie Flores Raras was shown in the United States with the title Reaching for the Moon (2013). It was directed by Bruno Barreto.

The film is based on the life of the great American poet, Elizabeth Bishop (Miranda Otto). As the movie begins, Elizabeth is traveling in Brazil, and visits the estate of the famous architect Lota de Macedo Soares, played by Glória Pires. Lota is in a lesbian relationship with Bishop's college friend Mary (Tracy Middendorf).

Despite Elizabeth's somewhat proper and restricted outlook, she accepts the love offered by Lota, even though this leaves Mary as the odd woman out. This act struck me as a shabby betrayal of an old friend, but, in the movie, it's treated as true love that makes such betrayal acceptable, if not inevitable.

It doesn't hurt that Lota has an enormous estate, and enormous resources. As an architect, Lota is able to envision and then design a beautiful writer's studio for Elizabeth.

The strong point of the movie is that it presents the writing of poetry as work. Elizabeth doesn't just close her eyes and wait until the poetic muse strikes her. She sits in the studio and pushes and pulls her poetry into shape. She's also not happy when she's interrupted during the creative process. This is the only film I can remember where creating a poem is shown as a process, and a delicate and difficult process at that.

This idyllic existence is disrupted by Brazilian political events, into which Lota plunges. The remainder of the movie is devoted to how these events play out in the lives of Elizabeth and Lota.

I don't know enough about the details of the coup, or of the lives of the film's principals, to know how accurately the film portrays them. This aspect of the movie is highly melodramatic, but the actual events were probably equally melodramatic. Certainly, the film holds your interest as the situation plays itself out to the end.

We saw this movie on the large screen, where it will work better, especially in the scenes set on Lota's estate. However, it will work well enough on the small screen. It's not a great movie, but it's certainly good enough to repay you for finding and watching it.

After the famous poet, Elizabeth Bishop, is greatly mentored by the star poet Robert Lowell, she, travels to Brazil, on her inheritance, has a love affair with a wealthy, female architect, who is in another love relationship with a former fellow student of Bishop's at Vassar College, called Mary. This threesome love relationship fails because each person involved in this relationship has a main flaw. Bishop's flaw is alcoholism. The architect's flaw is that she works herself to the point of mental insanity. Mary's flaw is jealousy. She does not want to share her architect girlfriend with Elizabeth Bishop, understandably.

When watching the film in the cinema, yesterday, with the oranges and the red wine, I bought at the booth, all of us clapped at the end of the film, with wonderful actors, very beautiful scenery of Brazil as well as fantastic architecture, before tortillas, guacamole, nachos, corona and other Latin American snacks that were cheaply sold outside.

This positive account begs the question, why I did not rate that film to be so good. Like many art-house or like many artsy films, Reaching for the Moon, we hardly know who most of the characters in this film truly are. There is just not enough character development in the film. We do not know what exactly makes Miss Bishop travel, why she loves this architect, why the architect loves her and why Mary loves this architect. We also do not know their views about belonging to a sexual minority. We do not know the reason for their flaws, such as the traumatic experiences that made Miss Bishop an alcoholic, what made the architect a workaholic, who does not talk to her family, and we know almost nothing about this third girl Mary, except that she went to University with Miss Bishop.

We do not know the exact cause or even the nature of the architect's insanity. When she kills herself, she leaves no note, and nobody even asks or tries to find out why the hell she did it or if it was an accident.

Like most films about poetry little attention is paid to the kind of Poetry Miss Bishop wrote, so that when she wins the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, in the film, you still end up leaving the movie theatre wondering why her poetry was considered to be so special, apart from the fact that she was rich, well educated and knew some of the greatest poets like Robert Lowell and Marian Moore.

This film is full of paper Mache' characters, in which you hardly know who the people in the film are, despite the strong attempts of the actors in the film to act as well as possible, which made the film worth watching, especially as a poet and author myself, amongst other things.

Glória Pires, as Lota de Macedo Soares, dominates this film to such a degree, we wonder why it's focus is the poet Elizabeth Bishop, brittlely acted by Miranda Otto. I suppose you could argue, "That's how it was both in life and their relationship," but as a viewer, our interest begs to know more about Soares.

This is a beautiful film about very talented, privileged people. An icey, supposedly repressed Bishop finds herself in the hot house of the Brazilian estate of Soares. Their torrid relationship is the subject of the film. We forget how dangerous same sex relationships were at the time, and film doesn't try to recreate that peril. And that makes some of the dynamics that plague the relationship a question. Why is Bishop able to sail above disastrous break-up; why is Soares destroyed.

What is fascinating is the liberation that the Soares estate, Petrópolis, provides. It's an Eden-like setting where the relationship flourishes. But we want more than "extraordinary people" have the same challenges in relationships as we, the ordinary. When Pulitzer Prises or major architectural commissions are awarded, the changes in dymanics that it brings aren't really explored. And I think these extraordinaryly talented people deserve a deeper, perhaps darker, film given the times they lived in and pressures it brought.