theater, for as a film, this one tends toward theatrical conversation and gesture as much as filmic image.
Most of Puig's novel is presented as a dialogue between the two men, and they reveal themselves in their own words. The true nature of their being cell mates is revealed in the middle of the novel. Until that point, the reader sees the two men as precisely what they say they are--two men imprisoned for quite different crimes and merely happening to be in the same cell and trying to make the best of it. In Chapter 8, the reader learns that this is not true and that Molina was deliberately planted in the cell to gather information. Molina is indeed a prisoner, but he is trying to win his release by finding out what he can about the terrorist group from which Valent?n has come. The reader is forced at this point to reconsider everything that Molina has said, in essence to reconsider those words to see if they have had a double meaning or if more of Molina is revealed in these words than one might have been able to see on first reading. Soon
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