After watching the Hector Babenco’s film adaptation of Kiss of the Spider Woman from 1985, it was obvious to me that there were a lot of differences between the film adaptation and the novel. It usually irks me when film adaptations are different from the novel but I was much more lenient when watching this specific film adaption. If he were to have stuck exactly with the novel, I don’t believe the film would’ve been very successful because it would have been two hours of two men in a jail cell talking. Successful or not though, the differences between the novel and the film were enough to change the whole atmosphere of the story. When reading it as a novel, the reader feels stuck in a cell like Valentin and Molina because there is no description of what is going on outside the jail. This causes us to feel as desperate as Valentin to hear Molina’s stories because it is through these stories that we get descriptions of a world outside a jail cell. However with the film, we do not only get to see Valentin and Molina’s surroundings within the cell but outside of it as well as a scene showing Molina walking in the streets clearly depicts. This causes the audience to react very differently to Molina’s stories because we are now distracted from Molina’s stories by the possibility of knowing what lies outside the cell. Molina also only tells one story in the film so not only does this make that particular story feel dragged out but it also gives more room for Babenco to portray the relationship between Molina and Valentin. What’s interesting is that while reading the novel, I pictured Valentin like a little boy captivated by an adult telling a story but in the film, Valentin is portrayed as a character that seems extremely uninterested in Molina’s stories. There is supposed to be a rather large age difference between Valentin and Molina and in the film, Valentin looks the same age, if not older, than Molina which again makes us see Valentin as less than a “captivated little boy” and more of a sullen older man.
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Third World Literature 
I liked how you said that while reading the book we feel like we are trapped in the cell with Molina and Valentin. The entire time I was reading the book I pictured Molina and Valentin in the exact same positions, not moving. I liked how the film offered more movement and liveliness (including scenes outside the cell) because this really put the characters into action. Despite the characters being actual people in the film, I felt like they were much more real in the book because the dialogue was so much more intimate.