"Lisetta" is adapted from a short story from Antônio Alcântara Machado, the most Paulistano of writers and its typical chronical works of São Paulo and the
influence of Italian immigrants during the early years of the 20th century, and here the lead character is a small girl (Márcia Cristina Ezequiel) who gets obsessed
with a panda bear that a richer girl carries with her during a streetcar trip. The girl keeps bothering her mom (Thelma Reston) and keeps demanding to get the bear
to the point of exhausting everybody around her, and mostly the mother who punishes the girl for her bad manners. Obvious that there'll be some surprises on the
way to the crying Lisetta.
It's a quite faithful adaptation that gets slightly extended from the original work and it doesn't betray the author. Greatly filmed and greatly presented through
its period recreation of the 1920's. There isn't much of an elevated purpose except in showing the typical behavior of children and their whiny ways, which was
portrayed in great accuracy and to the growns in the audiences comes as a trip to the past when all of us acted in a similar fashion when seeing things we wanted but
couldn't have. A clear exercise on frustration and how to deal with it, nothing more. From the same author, I hope that someday a director manages to adapt another
stories from "Brás, Bexiga e Barra", which is a classic compilation from Alcântara Machado short stories, in particular, I'd like to see the tragic "Gaetaninho", the
one about the boy who "crushed" the streetcar. A more inventive filmmaker could actually include him in this same story as well, two for the price of one. 7/10.
