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Introduction
A dama do lotaçao/Lady on the Bus (Neville D'Almeida, Brazil) was released in 1978. It was adapted from a crônica, published around 20 years earlier by playwright and journalist Nelson Rodrigues, who died in 1980. Rodrigues, as well as being a very successful newspaper columnist in Rio de Janeiro, and an excellent sports writer, was considered by many to have invented modern Brazilian theatre, with the staging in 1943 of the play Vestido de noiva/The Wedding Dress. His work has also had considerable repercussion in Brazilian cinema. A total of 19 feature films have been adapted from his work in Brazil, making him the most adapted Brazilian writer of all time, beating even the prolific and popular Jorge Amado.
While the critics might have rallied round in praise of Arnaldo Jabor's adaptation of Toda nudez será castigada/All Nudity Shall Be Punished2 (Brazil, 1972), cinema audiences clearly preferred A dama do lotaçao, making it the second most successful Brazilian film of all time, losing out only to Bruno Barreto's hugely popular Dona Flor e sens dois mandos/Dona Flor and her Two Husbands (Brazil, 1976). It could be argued, in fact, that it was partly thanks to the success of Dona Flor that A dama do lotaçao made so much at the boxoffice. Both films were sleek and expensive productions for their day, both were what can be loosely termed erotic movies, and more importantly, both starred Sonia Braga, who was arguably Brazil's biggest and sexiest film and television star. In the film she plays Solange, a sexually frustrated and recently married upper-middle-class woman, incapable of making love to her husband, who finds solace on Rio's busy buses, picking up strangers, like a carioca Belle de jour. On discovering his wife's philandering, the husband Carlos retreats to his bed and remains there, in a kind of living death, while his wife both dutifully assumes the role of nurse by night, and continues her sexual sojourns by day. (A naked nymphomaniac Sônia Braga having sex in the open air with complete strangers, not feeling guilty about it and not punished for it at the end-it is perhaps on one level easy to see why it appealed to so many male and female cinema-goers at the time)....