Response to "A Clean Well-lighted Place" Film Adaptation

In the film adaptation of “A Clean, Well-lighted Place”, there were a lot of things that really upset me.  In the story, the man was sitting in the shadows of a tree and it’s leaves.  The story says this three different times.   It has to be important.  The shadows are a symbol of the light and dark that this story plays with.  This point leads me to my next one which is if he is sitting under a tree, at least part of the café should be outside, right.  Well I guess not because he is sitting on a bench in the middle of the café.  Another thing that bothers me is that the story was written in the 1930’s, but there is a flat screen tv and speakers.  We could assume that the story is now set in the present, but then A young guard wearing a WWII uniform walks by.  I am confused by the conflicting time periods to the point where it starts to distract from the actual point of the story.

  In the movie it also bothered me that the two waiters were sitting at a table, in the middle of the hallway, in front of the bathroom.  What kind of waiters just sit talking by the bathrooms.  They could sit anywhere else in the café and look perfectly normal!  They should be sitting at another table or in the bar area where they could better see the old man and act like any normal people would.  The final and biggest problem that I had with the movie was that they were Irish.  That sounds bad but they are supposed to be Spanish.  They spoke Spanish in the story.  The old man paid with Spanish money in the story.  The older waiter says prayers substituting the Spanish word for nothing for most of the words.  Why isn’t the story set in somewhere like Spain!?  The Spanish elements add to the scene and make the story seem more complete, because you can imagine where they are.  This is completely ruined if you make the waiters Irish.  Why do they have to be Irish anyways?  Unless you are reading the story along with watching the film you can’t understand a single word that they are saying!

One of the few things that didn’t bother me from the film was how they used the parallel of the man walking in to the dark and the other man walking in to the light.  This was really interesting and it made me happy that they got at least one thing in the story right.