Reaching for the Moon

source: 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.

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.

Reaching for the moon So happy I saw this at preview. To test a film we were made to wait one hour almost while they got an unlock code to the digital file! If that isn't a test I can't think of another. This film passed across this barrier with aplomb. Both actor do a commendable job. The location is magic, a valley of lush greenery just outside Rio Janeiro Brazil. The relationship depicted works with the strange sub plot of the other woman r remain and bringing up baby, quite bazaar when you think back. For me the greatest pleasure might be discovery of Elizabeth bishop poems. I feel very fortunate to have added these to my experience of human condition. Further test I will see this film again tomorrow, not 2 weeks since the first viewing. A most unusual thing for me, the relentless consumer of movie's. The things that will hold are the script the locations, the cinematography, and so the direction. To discover the gestation of this movie over what 20 years and the passion that held the project alive to it's realization on screen are a compliment to all involved.! It'd be hard not to enjoy this film and opened to a world ratified and rarely accessible.

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.

Lovely. A story here that is not overshadowed by the relationships, politics, or agenda. It is, simply beautifully filmed, the beaches of Rio De Janeiro, the beautiful home Lota has deigned in part to accommodate her new lover, poet Elizabeth Bishop, completely played by Miranda Otto. Otto is at once restrained yet yearning, a Vassar graduate visiting her friend, who initially is puzzled (and indeed overwhelmed) by the beauty and passion of South America. She plays the American New England spinster type well, without a stereotype here. We can feel she wants, and NEEDS to break free from societal restraints. The filming of the rain forests, the owls at night, the visuals are incredible. Lota Soares was politically connected and designed the park near Carioca beach, the title infers, reaching for the moon has so may more connotations for each woman. What is most refreshing is the way this film is written, sensitive to the issues each woman experiences, it is an individual and a private journey. The actress portraying Carlotta Soares is affecting and sad, and Miranda Otto is quite believable as Bishop. The story is beautiful and sad, and the scenery of Brazil is not to be missed, simply beautiful, and beautifully filmed. 10/10

A gentle movie about relationships between three women. (Yes, I say three women as Mary lived with Bishop and Lota until the latter die.) And as every human relationship it is permeated with high, low and ... drama moments. When it comes to women it seems that directors never forget the drama. Blend together alcoholism, passion, money and drama and you have a genuine, feasible film, if based on true events. It feels that the characters lack in depth a little bit, but in this movie that was a good thing to me since the movie did not intend to replicate accurately the events (hence it is not possible to truly know what happened) . Therefore, t is up to the viewer to infer the finest nuances of those people based on the most general outlines shown in the film. It is a film to be savored and reflected as the years pass by within the plot.

I just finished watching this on Netflix streaming. I will be honest, I had not heard of either Elizabeth Bishop (not a poetry reader) or Lota de Macedo Soares (don't know that much about Brazilian history). What an explosion of a true story. I was memorized. Miranda Otto, who always delivers a great performance in everything that I've seen her in, was amazing. Her character was such a conflicted person and she came out doing it brilliantly! Now, for Gloria Pires, she was a force to be reckoned with. I can't say anymore than that. When she was on the screen, it was hard to NOT to look at her. Tracy Middendort was heart wrenching as the jilted lover. I could feel what she was going through because haven't we all had to do that at one time or another? Brava to all three leading ladies. Their performances were excellent and so true to life!

However truthful to Elizabeth Bishop's tragic love affair with Brazilian architect Lota de Macedo Soares, Bruno Barreto's Reaching for the Moon is more generally engaged with the question: Is the examined life worth suffering? In this corner, Elizabeth (Miranda Otto), a wan, fragile, painfully timid and insecure poet who is mortified to hear one of her poems read aloud. In her insecurity and sense of powerlessness she is Woman. She dresses like an office manager's wife and wears her hair tight to her face. She compulsively observes and anatomizes her observations. Her life is at first nothing but her examining it. In contrast Lota has a large strong face, flowing long hair, a man's stocky build, and a man's aggressive stride and nature. She never questions herself or her impulses and she has the money not just to do what she wants but to get others to do so too. When she tells Elizabeth that she and her current amour, Elizabeth's college friend Mary (Tracy Middendorf), were just roommates, she admits Mary hasn't thought that. Probably Lota hasn't either. To draw Mary back into her fold as a friend Lota buys her a child. Lota is also creative, designing her sumptuous country estate and — after she helps friend Carlos (Marcello Airoldi) get elected Governor — designs and supervises the construction of a large public park, with towering standards to provide the magic of moonlight. But she's not a thinker, a meditator. She just acts. Not given to self-analysis, when the new guest Elizabeth arrives Lota leaps to wrong conclusions about her. Part of their antithesis is cultural. As Elizabeth drunkenly tells the Rio audience at her National Book Awards dinner, "How can someone raised in the desert swim like a fish?" The withdrawn Elizabeth doesn't understand the Brazilian exuberance, constant joy, and carefreeness, as they celebrate everything — even after the military coup has reduced their freedoms. But the contrast is mainly in the women's character. Still, though Lota is the first to express her love for Elizabeth — which the poet only reciprocates when Lota is asleep — in their first clinch Elizabeth assumes the ardent initiative. And despite -- or because of -- her relentless analyzing, Elizabeth is an alcoholic. With her deep pessimism and self-doubt, Elizabeth stumbles from success to success: the Pulitzer, the NBA, a slot in The New Yorker, the man Aldous Huxley's approval, a teaching gig at NYU. Her life examining works for her. But the ebullient, confident Lota breaks down at her first defeat: the new government corrupts her vision of the park, converting it into the cliché sterile paved soccer court. When Elizabeth asks if her going to New York caused Lota's depression, Mary clearly blames the ruin of her project. "How could you think anyone could be that confident?" For her part, Mary begins as a jejeune, non-thinking sort who doesn't expect her college friend to steal her lover. Dumped, Mary realizes she has "no other option" than to love Lota. But by film end she has learned to read people and situations. Motherhood may have taught her wariness. When she aborts Elizabeth's correspondence with Lota it is not out of selfish malice, but because she knows that Lota's losing Elizabeth again would destroy her. Events prove her right. Hence the poem Elizabeth ends too soon at the start of the film and rounds out at the end. "The art of losing isn't hard to master." Not if you're a thinker. The frightened self- doubter sees enough loss to handle her own and not just thrive but survive. The robust willful woman who never paused to consider human vulnerability is defeated by her first loss — and kills herself at the second.

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.