Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Most Beautiful Thing’ On Netflix, Where A Divorced Woman Opens A Bossa Nova Club in 1950s Rio

You may think you know what life was like in 1959 because of shows like Mad Men, but what might have it been like in countries that weren’t quite as conservative as the U.S. was? You can see a glimpse into 1959 Rio in the new Netflix drama Most Beautiful Thing. Read on for more…

MOST BEAUTIFUL THING: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: Fireworks over an island. A woman floats a lit-up figurine on the water, with a voice over saying “A woman must have something beyond beauty. A bit of sorrow. A bit that cries. A bit that feels longing.”

The Gist: It’s 1959 in Brazil. Maria Luíza Carone Furtado (Maria Casadevall) is from a wealthy and influential family in São Paulo, and she’s about to move to Rio de Janeiro in order to open a restaurant with her husband, who has been in the coastal city setting things up. She’s excited about the prospect of striking out on her own, away from her family. She promises her son that they will go swimming in the ocean when he joins his parents there.

But she gets a cryptic phone call from her husband Pedro the night before, saying “sorry,” among other things. When she gets to Rio, she finds that the restaurant is nowhere close to being ready — and Pedro is missing. She soon finds out that he has not only been cheating on her, but he took all her money, too. She sets his clothes on fire, which leads her to befriending Adélia Araújo (Pathy Dejesus), who works for the woman who lives upstairs.

She gets invited by her friend Ligia (Fernanda Vasconcellos) and Ligia’s sister-in-law Thereza (Mel Lisboa) to a boat party put on by a record producer. There she meets a musician named Francisco “Chico” Carvalho (Leandro Lima), who sings a song that feels soothing and familiar to her drunken self. After she leaps off the mast of the ship, Thereza invites her to stay at her place, where Maria Luíza encounters Chico again. He talks about his song, which he calls samba jazz or bossa nova, very smooth music that makes you move.

Before she leaves for home, he takes her to a favela where samba musicians he’s worked with live. She encounters Adélia, who’s ticked that this conservative and rich white lady is there to co-opt her culture. But the encounter leads Malú (Chico’s nickname for her) to want to open a bossa nova club, over the objections of her father Ademar (João Bourbonnais), who cuts her off from his money.

Our Take: We’re so used to seeing period dramas about the ’50s and ’60s that take place in America, we lose sight of what that time period might have been like in other countries. Most Beautiful Thing (original title: Coisa Mais Linda), created by Giuliano Cedroni and Heather Roth, shows that while the Rio of 1959 wasn’t all that different than what we saw in the U.S., attitudes towards sexuality and the role of women were much looser.

There are a few period hiccups in the first episode, some hairstyles that don’t quite map with 1959, even in liberal Rio. But, for the most part, Roth and Cedroni have the feel of the era down, especially with the beautiful dresses worn by Malú and the others in her moneyed circle of friends. There’s a conflict between the traditionalists, who want women to be pretty and at home, and folks like Thereza and her husband Nelson (Alexandre Cioletti); he wants Thereza to be her own person, while Nelson’s brother Augusto (Gustavo Vaz) doesn’t think his judgement is the best.

So Malú is between these two worlds as she tries to get her bossa nova club off the ground. The first episode does a great job of setting up the relationships and conflicts we’ll see going forward: Thereza’s sexual fluidity, Adélia’s rocky relationship with her son’s father, a musician named Cap (Ícaro Silva), Malú and Chico, and Ligia’s desire to sing again, which will go against Augusto’s wishes. It’s all there in that first hour, and it makes for a good path for the season’s remaining six episodes to follow.

Sex and Skin: We see a topless Thereza having sex with Nelson near the end of the episode, but the first episode is generally chaste.

Parting Shot: As we hear some bossa nova playing, we see Thereza having sex, Adélia putting her engagement ring back on, and Malú confidently walking out of the airport, finally deciding to open the club instead of flying back home with her father.

Sleeper Star: Mel Lisboa’s Thereza Soares is an intriguing character, because we know she likes Malú for more reasons than just the fact that she drunkenly dived off a mast. She tells Malú that she’s had some cards dealt to her, and it’s made her wiser and stronger. We’ll see how that comes out in further episodes..

Most Pilot-y Line: “Everything seems so difficult right now,” says Malú to Thereza. “Says who?” asks Thereza. “Said my husband, when he shattered all my dreams.”

Our Call: STREAM IT. Most Beautiful Thing is a lush look at a woman stuck between her conservative life in São Paulo and the more open life she wants in Rio.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company’s Co.Create and elsewhere.

Stream Most Beautiful Thing on Netflix