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A Toned Down Kiss of the Spider Woman at Odds with Itself

Manuel Puig's Kiss of the Spider Woman makes for an awkward musical, let alone a movie musical. It is a depressing story about two men incarcerated and abused by an authoritarian regime set entirely in a prison -most of it in one prison cell. Sure there are recurring flights of escapist fancy through a storytelling device of one recounting to the other a favourite movie -but it is a Nazi propaganda film. Several ingredients primes for a dour, tasteless musical almost in the vein of "Springtime for Hitler". Regardless, it was in fact produced in 1992, by luminaries Kander and Ebb and Terrence McNally no less, and was a relative success. And now, perhaps to coincide with the fortieth anniversary of the acclaimed film version that inspired the show to begin with, comes a movie adaptation that lays clear the musical's flaws while adding a few of its own -yet being appealingly garish in other regards.
After the 1985 movie transferred context to the military dictatorship in Brazil, this film retained the novel's original setting of the junta in Argentina -albeit set at the end of that period in 1983 rather than the beginning. Tonatiuh plays movie-obsessed Luis Molina, imprisoned for his sexuality, sharing a cell with underground political dissident Valentin Arregui -here Diego Luna very much playing to type. As they while away their sentence, Molina secretly though reluctantly informing on Valentin, who is tortured on occasion for information, Molina entertains them both by dramatically reenacting his favourite movie -Kiss of the Spider Woman, starring Latin screen siren Ingrid Luna.
Jennifer Lopez plays the imagined approximation of Luna in the highly elaborate fantasies of Molina -not a character but a symbol and by nature of the musical construction here is given almost no dialogue that is not sung through. These sequences, which together chronicle the plot of the movie-within-the-movie (with certain artistic flourishes added by Molina and occasional critical commentary from Valentin -who is not a fan of musicals) are aesthetic benchmarks where they were formerly supplements, director Bill Condon emphasizing rigorously that old-fashioned atmosphere of Hollywood glamour. And there are some exuberant visuals that come with this, and the fascinating detail that Molina casts himself and Valentin in the leading male roles (giving Luna a chance to show off some classic movie star charisma). But the film itself has been completely re-shaped into something decidedly safe and unproblematic. It is a Golden Age Hollywood Latin-themed musical romance, where in the original story it was a work of Nazi propaganda Molina was endeavouring to reclaim. The allusion to musicals as their own form of propaganda is brought up by Valentin as perhaps a winking reference to this, though any honest discussion of such a notion is quickly abandoned by a movie that certainly doesn't want you to actually think about it in those terms.
But while the shift undoubtedly allows the film -and the show before it- to be more visually attractive, the story loses a fairly significant part of its complexity. Indeed Molina's love of a movie designed as a vessel of hate, stretching for some romantic value in it, is indicative of the central moral contradiction of his character -someone who claims support for revolutionary precepts but is unwilling to truly grapple with the system of oppression he lives under, who hates the junta but is willing to work with them for his own freedom at the expense of another's. It doesn't make him a bad character but an authentic one, and one who is in need of radicalization from Valentin. Stripping this from the story to make it more palatable comes with making Molina less of a conflicted character, more grounded in an acceptable system of beliefs, and thus his journey is less compelling. Indeed here he already has the ideology necessary to join the cause -his only motivation for doing so is his love for Valentin.
Tonatiuh nonetheless gives a rapturous performance, big and highfalutin and abounding in theatrical energy. He brings more emotional vulnerability than was seen in William Hurt's Oscar-winning interpretation, a means perhaps to humanize a character who does at times fall into traits of gay stereotype. That follows the original text, which additionally had a problem of equating Molina's homosexuality with transgenderism. I don't expect this is true of the original musical, but this film does make clearer the notion that Molina is actually trans (the pronouns I'm using here are merely for consistency's sake with the film), though Condon isn't willing to change enough in the script to more fully develop that. Luna meanwhile fits Valentin well -after two seasons of Andor, he can play a fierce leftist revolutionary in his sleep. Unfortunately, with a lot of specific politics left out of this version, he doesn't feel so intense as his predecessor Raul Julia, though he brings a lot of charm -especially to the movie-within-a-movie.
Lopez is the movie's resident A-lister though, yet apart from her style and powerful vocals on a few songs, she has a hard time capturing the weight of Ingrid Luna or her dual characters against the actual drama that matters in a storyline she has no part of. For this version of Molina's beloved star, Rita Hayworth is the clear model (a Latin actress forced to conceal her ethnicity and heritage), though Lopez infuses the performance with bits of Cyd Charisse or even Marilyn Monroe as well, creating a more holistic portrait of a Golden Age Hollywood star. She very much looks it and acts it for the relevant scenes, frequently the dominant centrepiece in the focus, colour, and choreography. Yet even still she is an accessory to the narrative and not an active part of it, which works against the highly emphasized glamour -something itself which is at odds with a general narrative that eschews the emptiness of such a thing.
The musical numbers here are predictably jarring in relation to the conditions of Molina and Valentin, the latter of whom is being systematically poisoned by the guards and suffers some terrible sickness. It is wild to go in a manner of minutes from a bombastic song in a sanitized fantasy to a man having to deal with soiling himself. Perhaps if the songs were more inspired there wouldn’t be an issue, but they aren’t particularly substantive or memorable. The title song, emerging at the climax, has a certain catchiness, but feels a touch like B-grade Howard Ashman. Tonatiuh does very well with a solo number “She’s a Woman” -one of the rare songs that carries into the real world -and his final one “Only in the Movies” is pretty good, but apart from some nice old-school choreography and a vividly fantastical atmosphere the other numbers don’t leave much of an impression -despite being key to the presentation. What they do though is emphasize the tone of accessible grandiosity this version of the story is going for, which is clear too in the various ways it tones down aspects of the story -as noted, the politics is largely window-dressing here, and the thirst for revolution, the importance of inspiring it in Molina, vastly underplayed.
The ending is indicative of this as well, the fates of characters altered so there is a sense of optimism -even the one that simply cannot be changed is grafted with catharsis, though a satisfying one on a different level to be fair. Still, Kiss of the Spider Woman boasts only a fraction of the meaning it did in prior formats -the musical architecture is a part of that but not all of it. Condon’s film is just too slick and glamourous for its subject matter, unwilling to deal with the harshest aspects of its story while trying to sell it as a crowd-pleaser ironically enough to a similar degree that Molina does his beloved Ingrid Luna film. Condon isn’t quite so charismatic a storyteller though, and what is left is an interesting and at times visually attractive film, but a fairly superficial one.

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