The Naked Braga

SPOTLIGHT

Who can say how the history of painting might have changed if Goya had known what a cigarette and high heels could do? But then, Goya didn't have access to Sonia Braga, the Brazilian actress who made an international reputation by looking pretty much the way she looks here in such films as Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands, The Lady on the Bus, Gabriela, and / Love You. The movies weren't very good, but Braga's act was foolproof: clothed, she was the Bahian next door; peeled, she was fiery, impassioned, hypnotically intense. In 1985, she landed her first major role in an English-language film, Kiss of the Spider Woman, and a world that had never shown much interest in Brazilian erotica beat a path to her door. Can she act? In Spider Woman she was hokey on purpose, and in The Milagro Beanfield War she seemed limited by a one-note role. But in her new movie, Paul Mazursky's wonderful Moon over Parador, she plays the mistress of a Trujillo-like dictator and gives a genuinely witty performance—her familiar smolder becomes the most beguiling comic shtick. Braga doesn't know just what she's doing next ("I want to garden, and learn English," she says), yet she's plainly game for anything. "I love everything involved with films," she bubbles, "cameras, cranes, people working, doing. I love being on location. I love films. I want to do many more films." O.K., but what kind of films? Doesn't she have any career goals? "What you spell g-o-a-l, I spell just g-o," she says.

STEPHEN SCHIFF