‘Bossa Nova’ Goes Astray From Tale of Romance

Bruno Barreto’s “Bossa Nova” is too much of a good thing. It has the irresistible music of the film’s title to set its seductive mood and pace, a Rio that glows with sensuality--and too many people and too many complications threatening to obscure the romantic comedy’s main attraction: Amy Irving and major Brazilian star Anto^nio Fagundes.

The chemistry is so right between these two charmers that we want to spend more time with them and less with some tedious types that clutter up the plot. The result is a film that tilts toward the slight and merely pleasant when it could have had much more emotional impact. We need more of a chance to get involved with Irving’s widowed Mary Ann and Fagundes’ attorney Pedro Paulo, whose frivolous wife (Debora Bloch) has just left him for a sexy young tai chi instructor (Kazuo Matsui).

Since Pedro Paulo’s master-tailor father has his business in the same Art Deco building where Mary Ann teaches English in a language school, it’s not surprising that their paths eventually cross. Pedro Paulo signs up for a class with Mary Ann, more to get to know her than to put an extra polish on his English pronunciation.

When Mary Ann, a lovely and poised former flight attendant from the U.S., lost her husband in a drowning accident two years earlier, she figured she had lost the love of her life.

Then along comes Pedro Paulo, silver-haired and handsome in that fleshy way of sleek, well-fed lawyers and businessmen who look born to wear double-breasted suits. Pedro Paulo’s impact is not lost on Mary Ann, but it’s forever getting short-circuited.

First there’s one of her pupils, obnoxious soccer star Acacio (Alexandre Borges), as eager to score with Mary Ann as on the playing field. Then there’s another student, Nadine (Drica Moraes), in need of constant advice on her Internet romance with a New Yorker (Stephen Tobolowsky). Then there’s Pedro Paulo’s obnoxious new intern (Giovanna Antonelli), who attracts Pedro Paulo’s quiet younger brother (Pedro Cardoso) as well as Acacio. Meanwhile, Pedro Paulo is representing his dapper father, Juan (Alberto de Mendoza), whose fourth and much younger wife is suing him for divorce.

It’s as if writers Alexandre Machado and Fernanda Young, in freely adapting Sergio Sant’Anna’s novel “Miss Simpson,” didn’t think Mary Ann and Pedro Paulo’s budding romance could be interesting enough in its own right--and, in fact, there seem to be no real obstacles between them to prevent its full flowering--so they keep cutting to sidebar characters as a source of distraction and misunderstanding.

Barreto has directed with his usual skill, but “Bossa Nova” winds up a minor item from the director of the classic “Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands,” “Four Days in November” and numerous other notable films.

* MPAA rating: R, for language and some sexual content. Times guidelines: The language is exceptionally strong, the sex minimal.

‘Bossa Nova’

Amy Irving: Mary Ann

Anto^nio Fagundes: Pedro Paulo

Alexandre Borges: Acacio

Debora Bloch: Ta^nia

A Sony Classics Picture release of an LC Barreto & Filmes do Equador production in association with Globo Filmes. Director Bruno Barreto. Producers Lucy and Luiz Carlos Barreto. Executive producer Bruno Barreto. Screenplay by Alexandre Machado and Fernanda Young; adapted from the novel “Miss Simpson,” by Sergio Sant’Anna. Cinematographer Pascal Rabaud. Editor Ray Hubley. Music Eumir Deodato. Costumes Emilia Duncan. Art directors Cassio Amarante & Carla Caffe. Running time: 1 hour, 35 minutes.

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