The Girls from Brazil

Trying to analyze the chemistry of Sonia Braga's sex appeal is no simple task. It may be easier to explain electricity by trapping fireflies in a bottle. The quick solution, perhaps, is to steal a line from the late Kenneth Tynan, the acerbic but perceptive English critic, whose first face-to-face encounter with Greta Garbo moved him to rhapsodize, "What, when drunk, one sees in other women, one sees in Garbo sober." Substitute Braga for Garbo and you're getting warm.

Indeed, warm is too cool a word to summarize the accolades from journalists smitten by Sonia. After she brought the Cannes Film Festival to its knees in 1981, Newsweek's Jack Kroll hailed her as "the most life-enhancing movie star in the world." Later, Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times extolled her "blinding sexuality," a hint that any man might plunge gladly into darkness if he could grope his way to Sonia.

My own first glimpse of Braga was at New York's Studio 54 in 1978. She wore a long, black, glittery gown held up by thin spaghetti straps that seemed to beg to be nibbled away. She danced like a panther in heat, jet hair flailing her shoulders, and all the dark young caballeros around her looked as frenzied as Latin lovers are supposed to be. The occasion was a party to celebrate the New York premiere of Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands, a comedy largely responsible for bringing Brazilian movies into (text continued on page 214)Sonia Braga(continued from page 86) the mainstream and making Braga an instant international star. Her subsequent films have been The Lady on the Bus, Arnaldo Jabor's provocative I Love You and the recent Gabriela, opposite Marcello Mastroianni. Despite mixed reviews for the pictures, her public is still aroused whenever Braga lets off steam. The next scheduled eruption will be Kiss of the Spider Woman, made in English in Brazil, starring Sonia in several roles as a movie-within-a-movie dream girl who fires up the fantasies of two jailbirds, played by Raul Julia and William Hurt.

Why do we dig her? Let me count the ways. I'll go back and recall the third (or was it the fourth?) time I met her, while doing a cable-TV interview in a New York hotel suite a couple of years ago. We had an offcamera translator, a serious language problem and a cameraman so entranced by Sonia's body English (well, body Portuguese, to be exact) that he had us hang around afterward while he spent ten minutes just photographing her hands. Her hands are exquisite, and she uses them--palms up, for the most part--as signal flags indicating everything from "So what?" to "God help us" and "Gimme a break."

We talked, back then, about her reputation as the Marilyn Monroe of South America. Palms raised, Sonia acknowledged some kinship. "I've always been inspired by what you call sex symbols, especially Marilyn Monroe. Mostly, I identify with her off the screen, as someone who was a frail, simple, fragile person, really very shy."

Like MM, Sonia also created a minor sensation early in her career by taking off her clothes. That historic unveiling was not for a calendar, however, but in a Brazilian stage production of Hair. "My grandfather came to see Hair. I was 18, performing nude, and he was the first person to stand up in the theater and applaud me."

She concluded that interview by talking about men, women, love and marriage. "When I speak of an ex-husband, it doesn't mean I was married, with a piece of paper. All my exes are friends. I have a lot of friends. But I'm not sure I'll marry. The qualities I look for in men are the same ones I like to find in women--for a man, coping with his fragility; for a woman, coping with her virility. So fragility and virility cannot be used as weapons against each other. In terms of motherhood, I don't know. I wouldn't peer into a crystal ball. I'm ready and able. But the point is, I don't believe in independent production when it comes to maternity."

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Flash forward to early 1984 and a fast, frenetic stopover at Kennedy Airport. En route to a holiday in Rome, Sonia had just gotten off a plane from Los Angeles, where she'd been doing her Playboy layout and looping her voice onto the sound track of Spider Woman. She was dressed in khaki traveling clothes, with a sleeveless T-shirt, complaining--in vastly improved English--that she was "jet-lagged." To me, she looked as vibrant as ever.

She was also slightly high from having seen 40 minutes of the unfinished Spider Woman. "It's a surprise how good it is. I think it will be the best movie I ever made. Have you read this Spider Woman, a famous book in Brazil? They also made it into a play. William Hurt and Raul Julia together are great. Can you imagine a man like Hurt pretending to be gay? He's a homosexual in jail with Raul, a political prisoner. The Brazilian people will love it. Brazilian people love things that are political and things that are gay."

Her uninhibited flow of conversation was hardly affected by TWA's announcement that her Rome flight was overbooked. Sonia airily dismissed the threat, positive that everything would be all right (and it was). She was holding some seminude Polaroids up to the light, oblivious of the eager, curious stares of several male fellow travelers.

"These I like very much, these not so much.... Did you see the pictures of me published in Italy? I was not amused ... they made me so angry." She referred to an Italian men's magazine full of outrageous misinformation, among other things. "They have me saying I fuck all my leading men in my movies! What crazy lies; they just invent everything!"

Our audience of eavesdroppers was raptly attentive by the time Sonia switched subjects to speak of Brazilian politics. While her films have successfully challenged a once rigid tradition of censorship, Sonia continues to be an outspoken advocate of freedom in every form--a defender of women's rights, actors' rights, workers' unions and every individual's right to self-fulfillment. Jet lag or no jet lag, by take-off time, she had improvised a vivid personal manifesto worthy of Jane Fonda.

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Her mood was relatively calm when we met again for lunch in a Manhattan restaurant one sweltering summer day. She was just back from Rome and thought she might want to move there for a while. But first, she'd spend a month in New York polishing her English (which was getting better all the time). Sonia was wearing jeans now, with a printed beige blouse, and had a long gold snake snapped onto her left ear. "You like this snake biting my ear? It's very expensive. I bought it in Rome. But I bought only one."

Rome, she confided, ought to be good for her, because everyone there was crazy about soccer. "They're just like Brazilians. In my country, you cry when you lose. It's like losing your father, losing a friend. The loss is a metaphor."

While she might make a lightweight subject sound serious, Sonia also had a knack for treating serious subjects lightly. Group therapy, when she described it, unexpectedly assumed the air of a weekend outing. "I live alone in Rio and had to go to see what it was. I went one day a week for six months, because we talked, talked, talked so much--and I love to talk. Besides, I must learn everything through experience. I had no school after I was 14. My college was movies, just movies."

Her fondness for talk propels Sonia into conversations with travelers, fans, even total strangers who approach her on the street. Here's one star who doesn't mind going public. "People don't bother me. Maybe I bother people with my talk. I am the people. When a person like me becomes an actor and begins to live life as a star, it's no longer real. I love it when people stop and recognize me."

In the wide-open world of Sonia Braga, even she sometimes seems like another person to the woman behind the myth. "That one up on the screen, my professional self, she's not me. She's like my best friend sometimes. She thinks about her career, about sex, many things ... she knows what she did for me also, and I know it. Too many actors think all the time about I, I, I ... only themselves. Better to speak of the economy, philosophy, flowers. But not drugs. I am against drugs. Look at me. I have energy. I speak, I dance, I get high on life...." She paused, swiftly pressing a slender palm to her cheek. "Oh, my God, you don't wear a watch. You will miss your next appointment. What time is it?"

Much too late. But who cared? Getting high on Braga is fantastically easy to do. And before Sonia's through with you, all the effusive praise of her sexy, spontaneous, life-enhancing aura begins to smack of simple common sense.

To call Claudia Ohana a "new" Sonia Braga would be unfair to both actresses, yet there are obvious parallels in their careers. Both became national idols in their native Brazil by starring in TV soap operas. Braga's was the original TV version of Gabriela, which established for the first time that an earthy, frizzy-haired native Brazilian woman might be accepted as a sex symbol in a land where gentlemen traditionally prefer blue-eyed Nordic blondes. Ohana's breakthrough was--and is--in another television saga called Love Is Paid with Love (or Amor com Amor se Paga, sounding better, somehow, in Portuguese). She's still shooting the series and seemed to be heartily sick of it when she showed up in New York on a brief promotional junket. "I'm the star," Claudia sighed, "an innocent girl who always sacrifices herself, which is not very interesting"--except to millions of Brazilians, that is.

Her fifth feature film, Erendira, had yet to be released in Rio de Janeiro but was already establishing Ohana as a new world-class wow in much the way that Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands had made Braga synonymous with steam-heated sensuousness. Claudia's title role, in a screenplay written by the Nobel Prize--winning Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez, features her as a teenager forced into prostitution by her greedy, flamboyant grandmother (Irene Papas). Directed by Ruy Guerra, the movie got mixed reviews in (text concluded on page 214)Claudia Ohana(continued from page 87) the U.S., though Claudia was OK'd by critical consensus as "charming ... exquisite ... gorgeous ... soulful," and lots more, all of it true.

A discreet journalist does not ask Ohana her opinion of Braga, or vice versa. Officially, they are not rivals. They are simply two irresistible forces emanating from a physically immense country once known mainly for exporting fruit, nuts, coffee and bad news. Even so, you look at Claudia and remember Sonia. They might be sisters--soul sisters, for certain. Claudia, at 21, is more than a dozen years younger--dark and graceful, with luminous eyes and a dewy bloom on her cheeks.

Innocence, however, is not what Claudia is all about. She has a child with director Guerra, who's 53; their daughter, Dandara, is named after the wife of a black Brazilian revolutionary. Shrugging off conventional queries about unconventional lifestyles, Claudia laughs a bit derisively about her last role before Erendira. The movie was called Paraiba no Rio. "Again, I was pure and wholesome. I played a blind flower girl who's kind to a poor man, like the girl with Chaplin in City Lights."

Erendira may be the key to changing all that. Claudia had a film offer in France last year but couldn't accept it because she was pregnant, and her portfolio contains some photographs taken in Italy for another tenuous project with director Lina Wertmüller. There's also an American director keenly interested in her. But Claudia would like her next move to be in theater. "A film actor limits himself too much. To be a great actress, you need to go on the stage, too. In my profession, I'm not here yet. I have just arrived, maybe."

All available evidence suggests that Ohana has arrived on the right track. Born into a family on the inside fringe of show business--her father is a painter, her mother a prominent film editor who died five years ago--she's not yet seasoned enough to seriously challenge a bombshell such as Braga. But there is plenty of room in the movie world for more than one South American sensation. As demonstrated in their own words and in Richard Fegley's exclusive photographs for Playboy, both Braga and Ohana are articulate, exceptional stars whose screen triumphs may do much to reshuffle the balance of trade between Beverly Hills and Rio.