This Rio Belongs to Lovers

“When you’re in love, that’s the Rio you see,” breathes Amy Irving of the Technicolor setting of her latest film, “Bossa Nova,” which is directed by her significant other, Bruno Barreto. And when the two are making a film together, they say, they fall in love with each other all over again, so they spent the 10 weeks of rehearsing and shooting the film in Brazil in a state of advanced bliss.

Barreto has called the Sony Pictures Classic film, which opens in Los Angeles on Friday, a love letter to Rio de Janeiro, his hometown. (He has also called it a gift to Irving, with whom he has shared a life for more than a decade.)

It is a pretty package: Well-manicured, well-dressed Brazilians trading snappy dialogue against the backdrop of azure sky, white sand beaches and Art Deco buildings, with nary a tattered “Central Station” urchin in sight.

“Everybody has some kind of fantasy about Rio,” says Barreto, 45, “and I wanted the film to take place in the Rio that people fantasize about.”

He notes that the spiritual inspiration for the movie is two bossa nova classics by songwriter Antonio Carlos Jobim. The sweetly melancholic lyrics of “Useless Landscape” open the movie; they remark on the meaninglessness of beautiful sky and scape without someone to share it with. “Wave”--not in the movie but much in the back of Barreto’s mind while making it--maintains that it is impossible to be happy if you’re alone in Rio.

“There is the Rio of the social problems; that’s there,” Barreto acknowledges. “Then there’s the Rio of the bossa nova; that’s there too.”

“To me even the slums are beautiful [when you’re in love],” says Irving, 46, with a soft laugh. On a recent visit to Los Angeles, she and Barreto, as carefully groomed as the main characters in “Bossa Nova,” each sit at an end of a long couch in a hotel suite. “They’re so colorful, they have the greatest real estate. Of course I know the underbelly, but once you know your way around, all the natural beauty emerges.”

“Bossa Nova” is a romantic comedy, specifically a screwball comedy in the manner of Howard Hawks and Preston Sturges, says Barreto. He admits that his 14th feature is a bit of a retro exercise, as well as “my most American film.”

Irving plays Mary Ann, an attractive 40-something American teaching English in Rio. Cheerful on the outside, she has a secret grief; her beloved husband died two years ago, and she misses him, keeping his pilot’s uniform in the closet as a way of holding on. One day in the office elevator, she is spotted by Pedro Paulo (played by Brazil’s own Cary Grant, Anto^nio Fagundes), a debonair lawyer who promptly decides to get to know her. When he finds out that she teaches English, he signs up for her class.

At home, Mary Ann is giving private English lessons to soccer star Acacio (Alexandre Borges), who is migrating to a British team but developing a crush on his teacher, and coaching her friend Nadine (Drica Moraes) in her Internet romance with an American. Meanwhile, Pedro Paulo’s shy brother (Pedro Cardoso) is mooning over Paulo’s saucy law intern (Giovanna Antonelli). This being romantic comedy, all the stories begin to converge in a serendipitous fashion.

Born in different hemispheres--Irving in Palo Alto, Barreto in Rio--they strike one as a singularly complementary couple. Irving seems the cool and controlled one with her straight-backed posture and precise elocution, the result of decades of theatrical training. He, with his dark beard and crisp dark suit, moves his whole torso as he speaks, as if pouring his soul into this moment.

Both grew up in show business. Irving, daughter of noted theater director Jules Irving and actress Priscilla Pointer, recalls, “I was doing theater [when] I was 9 months old, I was born in a trunk and I was put on stage. I’ve never been off the stage.”

She made her feature film debut with “Carrie,” then starred in several movies in the ‘80s, including “The Competition,” “Yentl” (playing the docile Jewish girl opposite rebel Jewish girl Barbra Streisand, who was cross-dressing to get an education) and “Crossing Delancey.”

During that time she had a decade-long on-again, off-again relationship with director Steven Spielberg, whom she ultimately married. (Curiously enough, they never made a film together; Irving has said that their artistic goals didn’t coincide.)

Barreto is the son of Lucy and Luis Carlos Barreto, two of Latin America’s most successful film producers (they produced “Bossa Nova”). At 17, Barreto made his first film, “Tati, the Girl” (1972). His third film, made when he was 20, was the erotic comedy “Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands.”

“It’s not amazing; it’s insane!” he exclaims. “I look back and I should have been doing something else--that’s why I was so neurotic and crazy--20?! What do you know at 20?”

Irving and Barreto met during the making of their first film together in 1989, “Show of Force,” a political thriller and the latter’s first foray into Hollywood. “When we met there was this definite attraction through the whole lunch,” Irving recalls. In the midst of separating from Spielberg, she held back, telling herself to stay professional.

“I was just coming out of a marriage, I needed some free time, I didn’t want to get involved right away: I had this mantra!” she says, laughing.

‘There Was So Much Sexual Tension’

Ten days into the shoot, Barreto, who is fastidiously careful of details, went to her dressing room to look at the underwear she would be wearing for a shot. ‘It’s not that he was kinky; he really wanted to be involved,” she says quickly. “They were going to show and it mattered. ‘There was so much sexual tension, modeling underpants for him!’

“You were teasing me,” he says. “I’m very thankful for the forwardness of American women.”

“So you’re saying it was all me that day?”

“Well, thank God it was you!” They’ve been together ever since.

In the last decade, Irving has been happily raising her two children--Max by Spielberg, Gabriel by Barreto--and makes regular appearances in theater and occasional ones in film (among them “I’m Not Rappaport,” “Deconstructing Harry,” “The Rage Carrie 2”).

In 1996 she appeared in another of Barreto’s films, “Carried Away” playing a middle-aged woman whose middle-aged boyfriend (Dennis Hopper) is cheating on her. Several years ago they moved from Los Angeles to New York, preferring the cultural ambience of the latter. It is also convenient for Irving’s stage career. This spring she did a turn in “The Vagina Monologues” off-Broadway.

Very Nervous About the Role

In “Bossa Nova” Mary Ann is the sane and balanced one, the one the other characters look to for ballast as their lives spin just a little out of control. Irving says she was very nervous about doing that kind of role.

“I’m a serious actress who has to act not serious,” she explains. “The challenge in that character is finding the line between the levity and the depth. She’s dealing with pain and loneliness as well as trying to find the positive side of life. . . . I couldn’t read the script and say I know exactly what I was going to do each day.”

“It was not about the psychology of the character,” Barreto offers. “There wasn’t much back story; she is who you see. It was a lot more about behavior than psychology.” He turns to her: ‘That’s why you were so nervous, you couldn’t prepare. You had to find it. . . .”

“On the spot,” she suggests.

“Exactly, on the spot.”

Asked whether she was leery about being involved with a director again, she says, “My father was a director; I’m a textbook case here. I’ve always fallen in love with directors. My first love was a theater director and I haven’t learned my lesson.”