The Most Beautiful Thing, a Netflix show
The Most Beautiful Thing, the Netflix show that made Brazilians, and foreigners fell in love with Rio de Janeiro. Again.
It’s not hard to fall in love with Rio de Janeiro. The city, known as The Marvelous City, has a peculiar way to mix stunning natural landscapes with a desirable urban life.
I’ve already written here about how you can visit Rio and absorb some culture— just in case you are bored with all the beauty.
The Most Beautiful Thing is a show about a rich woman abandoned by her husband at the beginning of the 1960s. It’s not Mrs. Maisel, although Maria Luiza, the hero of the show, has a sense of humor.
She is from São Paulo, a city where people work and escape now and then. Pedro, her husband, abandoned her with an unfinished restaurant in Rio de Janeiro and no money in their bank account.
During the 7 episode season, Maria Luiza not only discovers the magical Bossa Nova, which was in its earlier days. She also sees the hypocrisy of a bankrupt, male chauvinist society, or merely the ugly side of the marvelous city.
The production design of the show is impeccable, and also are the costume design, location choices, makeup, and hair. The cinematography allows you to feel the ocean breeze. It’s refreshing to watch the show after a long winter in NYC.
The Carioca (people who are from Rio de Janeiro) accent is present in a decent tone, and it feels pleasant to listen. The soundtrack is an excellent piece of art!
Unfortunately for Maria Luiza things happened way too fast and her friends got to live all the drama of being a woman in the early 1960s. To the protagonist was left the role of a naivety, silly rich girl, who spent the whole season screaming about independence but acting (in the subtext) to get fooled again; or at least upset.
The show is still far away from the feminism empowerment that 2019 women are thirsty. All-female actors in leading roles are doing something because of a man. Even when Maria Luiza and her friend Adélia are fixing the restaurant that her husband left behind, it’s a pity.
The scriptwriters tried to keep her family from São Paulo alive, but there is no place for them in Maria Luiza’s new life. Her father gave up too fast on fixing her bad decisions. Luck her?
The first scene is a voice-over of the protagonist declaiming a poem by Vinicius de Morais. Maria Luiza asks herself, and the audience, if a woman needs to be a little sorrow. She wasn’t. She was enchanted and inspired by a marvelous city.
She couldn’t feel the society she was trying to join, neither the audience. Being an abandoned woman, in the early 1960s in Brazil, was probably harder than her supportive friends made looked like. Their sorority was very ahead of the time.
