Daughter marry, husband cannot provide the life style she had got used. This spells trouble for the couple. She divorces and daughter and grand child return to parents' house.
I had hoped it was different in Brazil, but after travelling to mexico I realized the grass was not greener - all my peers that divorce - this was the trend for many - daughter return to live with parents taking child away - man left destroyed, bitter, crushed. American legal system always take woman side - man is completely marginalized to nothing. I was recently in Miami area - lots of recent south american types, I thought hey, they will be very nice and appreciative coming to ivory tower - nope - their expectations already very Jaded - how did they learn this so fast?
Reading the following article, I thought poverty in Brazil and powerful street gangs meant women were less correlated to american counterpart:
nytimes.com
Brazilian Director Changes the Recipe for the Film of a Le Carré Novel
By CHARLES McGRATH
Mike Newell, perhaps best known for 'Four Weddings and a Funeral,' was supposed to direct 'The Constant Gardener,' a new film based on the John le Carré thriller of the same title, which opens on Aug. 26. But then Mr. Newell signed on to make 'Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire,' the fourth installment in the Hogwarts saga, and Simon Channing Williams, the producer of 'The Constant Gardener,' decided he might have a class problem.
'It suddenly occurred to me that we had been going down the wrong track,' Mr. Channing Williams said recently in an interview at his London office. 'Here we had a middle-class author, a middle-class director, a middle-class producer and a middle-class actor,' he explained, referring to Mr. Le Carré, Mr. Newell, himself and Ralph Fiennes, who had already been cast in the lead. He added that this was perhaps an opportunity to think outside class boundaries.
'The Constant Gardener' is in part the story of a man who, like the original scheme for the movie, is in danger of suffocating within the British class system: Justin Quayle, the title character, is an Old Etonian who works as a pen-pushing midlevel diplomat at the British High Commission in Kenya and is concerned mostly with tending his flower garden and keeping up appearances. But the book is also the story of Quayle's liberation, through a love affair and marriage and, eventually, as he tries to solve the mystery of his wife's murder, through immersion in Kenya itself.
Kenya is more than a setting, in fact; it's practically a character. Once Mr. Channing Williams realized that, he said, his thinking led him inevitably to Fernando Meirelles, the Brazilian director who was nominated for an Academy Award for 'City of God,' his film about rivalry among child gangs in the slums of Rio. 'Fernando is not interested in the British class structure,' Mr. Channing Williams said. 'What he brings to this is his innate understanding of human nature.'
After the success of 'City of God,' Mr. Meirelles found himself much in demand. He was even offered 'Collateral,' the Tom Cruise and Jamie Foxx thriller. But he is not a fan of big studio movies and he turned all his suitors down. He did agree to meet with Mr. Channing Williams, however, because he is a great admirer of the director Mike Leigh, and Mr. Channing Williams has produced a number of Mr. Leigh's films. Mr. Channing Williams gave Mr. Meirelles the 'Constant Gardener' script, and Mr. Meirelles, who as it happens had just been visiting Kenya himself, signed on virtually overnight.
Right away he started tinkering with Jeffrey Caine's screenplay. 'When John le Carré wrote the story, the story's seen through a British point of view,' Mr. Meirelles said in an interview in New York in June. 'And I think when I read the story, I put myself on the Kenyan side because, really, I come from Brazil.' Among other things, Mr. Meirelles wrote several new African characters into the story, not all of whom survived the cutting process.
What does remain is a remarkable sense of place: a vivid evocation of the Kenyan landscape and cityscape in one of Nairobi's most down-and-out neighborhoods, through which sewage flows in open, rag-cluttered trenches; and tracking shots of Kibera, Nairobi's sprawling, tin-roofed shantytown, which are as enthralling as they are disturbing.
'As you know, there's a lot of slums in Brazil,' Mr. Meirelles said. 'But compared to the slums in Kenya, the Brazilian ones are really Beverly Hills.' In Kenya, he said: 'They don't have water, they don't have electricity, they don't have cement - it's all dirt. And they cook with fire. Can you imagine? A million people living there and everyone cooking with fire in the middle of the city? It's the poorest place I've ever seen in my life.'
The global train to the bottom stops where?
Though Mr. Meirelles had never made a film outside Brazil before, Mr. Channing Williams said he wasn't worried and pointed out that 'at a certain level, filmmaking is just filmmaking.' Mr. Meirelles said much the same thing, adding that the main difference between 'The Constant Gardener' and other films he had worked on was that 'the wine is better; you travel first class.' The only thing that made him nervous, he said, was meeting Ralph Fiennes. 'I said to myself: 'Well, what am I going to say to Ralph Fiennes?' '
But Mr. Fiennes immediately understood his point of view in telling the story, Mr. Mereilles said, and they got along just fine. He also enjoyed working with Rachel Weisz, who plays Tessa, Quayle's wife, and brings some sensuous immediacy to a role that in the novel is perhaps overly idealized. 'I think I was very lucky with this,' Mr. Meirelles said of both actors. 'Not only because they're good actors but because of their commitment. I was not expecting that level of commitment with stars.'
Mr. Meirelles, who before he got into feature filmmaking had shot by his count more than a thousand 30-second commercials for Brazilian television, is used to working quickly and with a small crew, and he occasionally felt oppressed by the sheer scale of the 'Constant Gardener' production. 'You know, I just wanted to go places and shoot something with a hand-held camera,' he said, recalling that his favorite moments were when he stole away with a cameraman, a soundman, his director of photography, César Charlone, and one or two of the actors. One such scene takes place when Tessa and her friend Arnold Bluhm, an African doctor, simply walk through Kibera, as Kenyan life throngs around them. 'No security, no production, nobody,' Mr. Meirelles said. 'Just five people walking around, and we improvised some very good lines.'
Shades and indian friend in atlanta few years back, lot of african refugee types, shades and friend think hey - they not like american evil woman - more easygoing with thier new found wealth and freedom - OOPS - that was mistake - did not take them long to adapt to american counterpart - I would say 6 months. |
