Discussing “The promise payer”

a (re) interpretation of adaptation from the prism of religious intolerance

Abstract

Dias Gomes’ play, The promise payer, released in 1960, was adapted for cinema by Anselmo Duarte, two years later. By moving between classic cinematographic narrative and “filmed theater”, the film of the same name revived a fruitful debate between classic and modern cinema and its incursions into the themes of social inequality and religious intolerance. This article analyzes in the cinematographic work how the concepts of religious intolerance and religious syncretism, about myth and symbolic construction, were adapted, expressed in the protagonist’s battle to fulfill his promise. Problematizing the concept of adaptation, adopting the principle of cinematographic hypertext and tensioning the debates around the cinematic narrative, we seek support in filmic content analysis, decomposing the film into essential scenes dealing with the dimension of religious intolerance and its current situation in Brazil. It was verified that the film’s narrative compositions are not “filmed theater” since the diversity of plans, the metric and rhythm of its classic editing could never be replicated in the theater. Even though the original text is a play, its inventiveness signaled an unparalleled narrative richness that makes debates about religious intolerance current.