Be gentle, instinct says. Indulge your old affection for fairy tales in accepting this movie's notion of a long-stemmed beauty from Bahia arriving in San Francisco and, inside of three or four days, becoming a major TV attraction who has most of the population (including all of the males) worshiping at her shrine. Next, accept that the shrine is a 30-minute cooking show. Then, find it matchlessly funny (and somehow relevant) that the heroine suffers from motion sickness. Also, get enthralled with her philandering husband, a fellow who breaks into song at no provocation whatsoever, especially after he pursues her to America in the hope of patching up their marriage. While you're at it, find yourself highly amused by the heroine's best friend from back home, a drag queen with a wardrobe that would shame Carmen Miranda.
Venezuelan-born director Fina Torres (Celestial Clockwork) and first-time Brazilian screenwriter Vera Blasi obviously hope to charm our socks off. But they are a bit too pleased with themselves, and they wind up with a terminal case of the cutes. A committee of hard-nosed studio accountants couldn't have dreamed up a collection of elements more cunningly designed for the mass marketplace. Consider: Lilting Brazilian sambas. Glamorous San Francisco. Yet another plot trading on the sensuality of food. What more could you ask for? Well, how about a vision of instant TV fame and fortune in the era of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? Some Afro-Brazilian hocus-pocus invoking a sea goddess called Yemanja? And a touch of cross-dressing, which has become a staple even in U.S. beer commercials? Not only that: The whole thing is in English, which eliminates the need for those annoying subtitles. And it features an exceptionally lovely leading lady, Spanish star Penelope Cruz (All About My Mother), who's turned out in a dazzling array of costumes.
Everything might come together, too, were it not for terrible writing, marginal acting, some bewildering lapses of logic, and a fatal smugness. To wit: The movie consistently fails to actually deliver the charm it presumes to have, it's singularly unfunny, and the heroine, whose name is Isabella, is not nearly as charismatic as Torres and Blasi would have us believe. A writer and director can have a beautiful woman wearing a red dress walk out of an apartment building and order several hundred apparently awestruck men to fall into step behind her. But unless some kind of magic has been firmly established, the scene is ludicrous. Moviemakers can propose a saloonful of beer-drinking sports junkies who are suddenly transfixed by a woman in a chef's toque cooking up coconut shrimp. But that runs the risk of reducing her to some kind of caricatured sex object. You can talk about Yemanja all you want, but if you don't feel the goddess's presence, the effect falls flat. Said simply, Isabella doesn't earn her stripes, even as a minor boob-tube celebrity, much less a force of nature.
