"Also Known As (AKA)
(...)
Pretty But Wicked"
(IMDB.com)
Edgard, a poor office worker, is approached by a superior with the proposition of marrying the company owner's daughter, who, according to him, has been raped. Edgard has qualms of conscience about accepting the proposition; they are compounded by the fact that he has a crush on his neighbor, a poor teacher in a school for young kids.
This is the second adaptation I have watched of the same play. The other one is more recent (of 1981), but I saw it a long time ago, at the time of its cinematic release. If memory serves me, this older one is the better -- though by far also the lesser known -- one. It's a simple production, obviously operating on a shoestring budget, but the actors give very serviceable performances, and the text seems to have been understood in its totality, or almost so. It's possibly not the best play by Rodrigues (I haven't read or seen them all), but it's possibly the funniest among the ones I know. In a sense, it's more at home as cinema than as a stage play, because of all the car rides and similar scenes which become so more natural when staged in a realistic way. The film adds at least one original touch -- the references to Crime and Punishment's protagonist -- but mostly it's a faithful adaptation. The play's author was a self-styled reactionary who, perhaps involuntarily, exposed the ridiculous face of reactionary ideologies. That may be observed in this film, which, though ostensibly reactionary in ideology, provides an examination of the deleterious effect of the economic power wielded by the bourgeois class.
Rating: 51
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