Bill Condon’s Kiss of the Spider Woman is an adaptation of Terrence McNally’s 1992 stage musical, starring Jennifer Lopez and Tonatiuh.Mongrel Media
Kiss of the Spider Woman
Directed by Bill Condon
Written by Bill Condon, based on the musical by Terrence McNally, John Kander and Fred Ebb
Starring Diego Luna, Tonatiuh and Jennifer Lopez
Classification N/A; 128 minutes
Opens in theatres Oct. 17
In 1983, at the tail end of Argentina’s Dirty War, a queer window dresser and a political dissident enact a soapy, lurid fantasy from their shared prison cell. Molina (Tonatiuh), emphatically bubbly, adorns his bunk with beaded curtains and posters of his dearest Old Hollywood starlet, Ingrid Luna (Jennifer Lopez). Across the gunmetal-grey gulf of the cell, Valentín (Diego Luna) sulkily reads a biography of Lenin.
Already, it’s clear this is a film of clunky juxtapositions: cliché characters with deep margins of difference will reconcile their suffering, against all odds, together. Bill Condon’s Kiss of the Spider Woman – an adaptation of Terrence McNally’s 1992 stage musical, itself a remodelling of the 1976 novel by Manuel Puig – is ironically easy-listening, unblemished by its own political realities. And still, alongside today’s visually anemic (Wicked) or outright callous (Emilia Pérez) commercial movie musicals, it’s passable.
Unbeknownst to our tetchy revolutionary – who is finding his cellmate’s effeminate attitude and lack of politics grating – Molina is goaded into being an informant in exchange for potential parole, meant to relay the details of Valentín’s accomplices to the warden. To make Valentín more talkative, Molina relays in crystalline detail the plot of his favourite Ingrid Luna-starring film, Kiss of the Spider Woman.
Jennifer Lopez plays a mysterious “Spider Woman” who demands an annual sacrifice.Mongrel Media
Through his description, the silver screen spectacle appears before our eyes. Aurora, a fashion editor for a Vogue-ish Latin American magazine played by the fictional actress, falls for an accomplished photographer (imagined as Valentín). She soon learns that her village is protected by a mysterious “Spider Woman” who demands the annual sacrifice – via her kiss of death – of a native woman’s lover.
In stage and film tradition, Lopez plays a third role as the eponymous arachnid-lady, clad in a Velma-Kelly-meets-Lydia-Deetz wig and a silvery, gossamer gown. She lately seems to project her pop star persona onto every role, but as Aurora, is impressively camouflaged by Veronica Lake-style curls, singing and moving with hypnotic appeal. Molina also inserts himself in the story as Aurora’s gay-coded assistant – his real-life fawning given legitimacy through this passionate inner story.
The idea of art as escapism is a bit moth-eaten by the time it reaches this iteration of the story, after award-winning productions on Broadway and the West End, as well as Héctor Babenco’s 1985 non-musical film starring Raul Julia and William Hurt. (Indeed, Babenco’s version, even for its lack of theatricality, felt more ambitious in its fantasy structure.)
The look and feel of Condon’s film-within-the-film is uneven, with actors airbrushed to plasticky effect and production design that is both kitschy and uncanny – too slick to be the sort you’d find in B-movies of the era but too shoddy to evoke a tradition of studio movie musicals. Although, the simulated technicolor is a welcome change from lower-contrast palettes in other musicals and brings with it both pastiche and personality.
The choreography is on a number-by-number basis, at times stiff or predictable, with the key exception being the Gimme Love sequence, choreographed by Christopher Scott (as opposed to the rest of the film by Sergio Trujillo and Brandon Bieber). This scene, also the most visually interesting emulation of Golden Age movie musicals, feels miles ahead of the surrounding material.
Tonatiuh plays Molina in Kiss of the Spider Woman.Mongrel Media
The political dimensions of the film are relatively superficial, as though the story could be transposed onto any autocratic setting. A similar sanitization occurs with this iteration of the Molina character, who is imprisoned for public indecency, whereas in the earlier film, novel and musical, the charge was specifically for corrupting a minor. Babenco’s Molina in 1985 is actually recounting a Nazi propaganda film with what he believes to be a totally romantic subplot.
This complexity – a character who is evidently grappling with their identity under the most isolating conditions, while also scheming to betray a friend after being charged with abuse – is what enhances the delusions, good and bad, of this specific story. Condon dutifully plays up themes of queerness and gender nonconformity, but in his effort to moralize (or martyr) these characters, flattens them.
In adapting the musical, Condon also cut all of the numbers set in the film’s “reality” in the prison, to accentuate the stark difference between life under the Argentine military regime and the flouncy, fancy-free spirit of the imagined musical. Instead of characters simply breaking out into song, the excluded numbers are used as underscoring, with characters humming along or plucking at a guitar in the courtyard.
The decision to pose the destitute conditions of the prison against the dreaminess of Molina and Valentín’s collective delusion only produces the sensation that we are watching two entirely different films which never risk blurring together. In fantasizing fantasy, Condon, who once gave us far campier images (see: CGI Renesmee in the later Twilight films), defaults to less imprinting sights and stifled tropes in this mostly unmemorable spectacle.