Nina

A farcical, highly abridged adaptation of Dostoevsky's _Crime and Punishment_ set in contemporary Sao Paulo. The protagonist is an underemployed girl who wallpapers her room with the dark, manga-like cartoons she draws. This is perhaps indicative of her introversion, her immersion in a world of fantastic ideas and impressions; when events elicit highly charged reactions, these are rendered as cartoons. The girl's nemesis is her shrewish, niggardly landlady, who is rendered very convincingly detestable (in far more detail than Alena Ivanovna was). How Nina deals with her will come as no surprise to readers of the original novel but here that crime becomes a culmination of the story rather than its centerpiece. The focus, instead, is on the straitened youthful existence that leads up to it. A highlight of the film is Nina's encounter and tryst with a very characterful blind man.

"Nina" is an entertaining affair with none of the religious depth and anxiety of the book it is based on.