Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert’s ubiquitous travel memoir, is now a movie starring Julia Roberts as Gilbert. If the trailer is any indication, the film emphasizes the glib aspects of a memoir that teeters between messy real life and staged epiphanies. In the film, our first glimpse of Roberts/Gilbert, reacting to the prophecy of the requisite toothless holy man, shows a flash of Robert’s patented self-satisfied smirk. This doesn’t bode well for the film, which opens August 13.

Here’s the trailer:

For those three or four people who’ve never heard of Eat, Pray, Love, suffice to say that it’s self-realization and travel porn for the thinking woman.

Despite my reservations, I won’t be able to resist seeing the film anymore than I could resist reading the book. Critics were less than kind. Maureen Callahan called the book “narcissistic New Age reading.” Lev Grossman said the author was “trying too hard to be liked.” Grace Lichtenstein said the only thing wrong with the book is that “it seems so much like a Jennifer Aniston movie.”

I agree with all of those critics, and yet I tore through Eat, Pray, Love, reveling in Gilbert’s incisive descriptions of far-flung locales and internal states, spouting select quotes to my friends, and giving the book as a gift to more than one (woman) friend. Gilbert is compulsively readable, and if afterwards I felt a little queasy about the fast food feast I’d just wolfed down, in the midst of the meal I thought I was absorbing valuable nutrients.

And the film? Well, Javier Bardem plays Felipe, the Brazilian guy Gilbert falls for in Bali. I’ll go just to hear how a Spaniard tackles a Brazilian accent.

the woman of the hour: Maria Belen Chapur

During the last week of June 2009, no one could locate South Carolina governor Mark Sanford, a Republican in his second term. Aids said Sanford, married and with four sons, was hiking the Appalachian Trail, but even they seemed unsure. Then the cat clawed its way out of the bag—Sanford was in Argentina, with his Argentine girlfriend (the press used the old-fashioned word “mistress” to make the story juicier). His wife, it came out, had known about la argentina, Maria Belen Chaper, for a few weeks, and had given Sanford the boot.

“The mistress” is 43, divorced, with 2 children of her own. She works at a multinational agribusiness corporation and is fluent in Spanish, English, Portuguese, and Chinese. She lives, the press reported (with photos and google maps!) in the upscale Buenos Aires neighborhood of Palermo.

Belen Chaper sounds like a woman of substance and accomplishment. But even if she weren’t, she has, to Sanford, one other enticing allure: she’s foreign. She doesn’t look, smell, sounds or taste like the women in Sanford’s South Carolina home. The very way she thinks, moves, and scrambles an egg is decidedly unfamiliar. And he, in turn, is foreign to her.

Anyone who’s had a foreign fling knows that
ho-hum + foreign accent = doable
& appealing + foreign accent = utterly irresistible

What happens when the fling steadies into a real relationship? Well, then things get tricky. The same foreignness that first drew you in is now, subtly and not-so-subtly, pushing you away. It’s the same thing that happens in every relationship—what draws you in starts to drive you crazy. But with a cross-cultural relationship, the differences are wider and deeper. Those who can manage it end up with a wider frame of reference and a deeper understanding of the varieties of humanness. Either that or they go stark raving mad.

If Sanford ends up staying with his ‘mistress,” let’s check in in a year or two to see how things are going.