Review by Fernando Figueroa

Very poor adaptation. Those of us who read the 100-page novella know that the story first highlights Mari’s instinct for self-discovery, but also, progressively, her desire for sadomasochism, which she achieves with the translator who helped her—albeit unintentionally—to gain an existential sense of belonging and, even in her submission, a variety of power within a milieu in which she had no say alongside her mother at the hotel. The film changes the ending, giving importance to the translator’s nephew/son, who captivated her in each of their encounters because of the suffocating loneliness he was going through – simply by working at the Iris Hotel alongside his mother.

Mari’s father’s participation in the story is omitted, even though he plays an important role in the dénouement on the ferry—the entire sequence that was cut from the original—when he discovers the translator and is accidentally killed. Instead, the end of the film plays with ambiguity, with Mari wearing the yellow sweater, then the blouse, and the opacity of when the translator’s body is found, a man with a criminal record whose body no one recognises except her. The end of the film adds importance to the nephew/son going to the Iris Hotel, foreshadowing that the situation will continue, but, as I said, key dialogue has been cut.

where she finally realises what attracts her to the translator despite him being older than her, ‘forcing me, humiliating me mercilessly’ (p. 45). Mari’s encounters with the hotel Iris clerk or assistant – called aunt in the film – are key to understanding the mirrors of Mari and the translator in the ambivalence of ‘I am you’, to situate Mari’s search for herself by going beyond her own limits, exactly what attracted her to the translator when she saw how he mistreated the prostitute in room 201 on the day she saw him for the first time before following him.

Nor is the psychological and enigmatic complexity well defined, which does not allow the reader to be sure whether this is a bildungsroman or a potential nymphomaniac when she actually discovers her virile personality by escaping from the cloister of the hotel.