Lisbela and the Prisoner

Leléu is a travelling con man who moves from town to town showing films, making promises to women and running on to the next place. In one town he meets Lisbela. She is engaged, mad about cinema, and wants to arrange her life the way it happens in films. Meanwhile a hired gunman is after Leléu, engaged by a man whose wife he seduced. The subject is not love but what cinema teaches people. Lisbela sees life as a film and precisely because of that acts bravely in real life; that is both the joke and the argument. The form is a folk comedy of Brazil's northeast: fast dialogue, exaggerated characters, coincidence constantly intervening. The source is a stage play by Osman Lins. Guel Arraes had first worked the story for television and then carried it to cinema, a route he used often and that became a common path for stage adaptations reaching the screen in Brazil. The film was among the most-watched productions of its year there. Selton Mello plays Leléu, Débora Falabella plays Lisbela and Virginia Cavendish the gunman's wife. Who it is for: viewers who like Brazilian comedy and fast romantic narrative. Who it is not for: anyone who needs the characters to be realistic; the film is deliberately broad and uses its types as types.