BRATTLEBORO — What makes a great love story?
It comes from the shared experiences we all have in the agony and ecstasy of our passions, expressed through an art form that transcends time and personal traits.
Even better, it's set against the backdrop of historical changes in which the protagonists are caught up. Its settings expand the vision to new and dynamic horizons. And, most of all, its characters are complex, multi-layered, and accomplished, as much formed by fate as they themselves create a world that will affect countless others.
And - oh, yes - it's a true story.
Reaching for the Moon (Flores Raras), by director Bruno Barreto, a Brazilian New Yorker, is based on Carmen L. Oliveira's 2002 biography Rare and Commonplace Flowers. The film follows 17 years of the tempest-tossed love affair between multi-award-winning American poet Elizabeth Bishop and the Brazilian architect Lota de Macedo Soares, whose design of Flamengo Park in Rio de Janeiro, along with Bishop's writing of Poems: North & South - A Cold Spring, which earned her the Pulitzer Prize, forms the pivotal point of the plot.
The film opens at the Duck Pond in New York's Central Park, where Bishop (played by the excellent Miranda Otto) is having her weekly meeting with Robert Lowell. Her writing is stalled, and she cannot find her way into a new poem she recites for him. Lowell recommends a vacation.
In short order, Bishop is stepping off the boat in Rio de Janeiro, to be met by her old friend from Vassar, former ballet dancer Mary Morse (Tracy Middendorf, in a demanding role that she executes well) and her lover, the swaggering, demanding, highly talented architect Lota (Glória Pires).
Off they all drive, crushed together in the small Jaguar, to Samambaia, Lota's home outside Rio, where the human drama really takes off.
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Bishop is the epitome of the cold North. Mannered, shy, quietly genius, she is much taken aback by the heat and exuberance of both climate and culture.
A combustible mix quickly catches flame when Lota's brash, uninhibited manner clashes with the fragile and alcoholic Bishop. And caught between them is Mary.
A days-long visit turns into 15 years of a remarkable progression of events that will take us through a military coup, a Pulitzer Prize, and, inevitably, back to New York and a moving crescendo to the film.
The sophistication of the film is obvious at every turn. Multilayered in metaphor and twining plot, in the use of landscape and color, in the truly enjoyable and authentic portrayal of the lovers in their sensuality and creative work, Reaching for the Moon stands proud in itself, yet also incidentally provides a welcome window into a period in history of two geniuses who deserve to be better known.