Directed by: Bill Condon
Distributed by: Lionsgate, Roadside Attractions, LD Entertainment
Written by Anna Harrison
80/100
“I hate musicals.”
“Then I pity you.”
This exchange happens only a few minutes into Bill Condon’s “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” an adaptation of the John Kander, Fred Ebb, and Terrence McNally stage musical (in turn an adaptation of the Manuel Puig book which has already been adapted into a play and a movie), and neatly sums up my own feelings on the movie: to all those who did not like “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” I pity you.
Movie musicals are tricky. There can be a self-seriousness or self-aggrandizement to them that ruins the effect and yet, if the film does not take itself seriously enough and feels too self-conscious of its own musicality, no one buys the whole spontaneously-bursting-into-song thing. (I am sure that, somewhere, someone has written a piece on how the cinematic apparatus applies to musicals—does our belief in cinema as “real” change when we bring uncanny elements of stage theater into it? Do I even remember my film theory classes properly?) Condon, as a veteran of many movie musicals—some admittedly more successful than others—avoids this problem entirely by splitting his movie in half.
On the one hand: Luis Molina (Tonatiuh) and Valentin Arregui (Diego Luna) are two men shoved together in an Argentinian prison in 1983, at the tail end of the military dictatorship in Argentina. Molina has been placed there for public indecency (read: he’s gay and was caught having sex with a man, which is much easier to swallow than the original movie and musical’s accusation of seducing a minor), whereas Arregui is a journalist hidden away to keep the state secrets, well, secret. The walls are cold, the guards brutal, and the colors drab. To cope, Valentin furiously journals and paces up and down the tiny cell; Molina, who repeatedly insists he is apolitical, replays his favorite movie, “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” in his head and recites it out loud to his cellmate.
Thus we get to the other hand: as Molina tells his grouchy cellmate—he of “I hate musicals” fame—about “Kiss of the Spider Woman” and its star, Ingrid Luna (Jennifer Lopez), the bars of prison drop away to transport us into the movie as Molina loses himself in fiction to cope with his reality. While the original stage musical has songs throughout, including ones sung by Valentin, Condon nixes almost all of them, which results in an uneven dispersal of songs (and the loss of some powerful numbers) but a more direct and distressing contrast between the conditions of the prison and Molina’s longing for a world full of color and love. This way, any gripes about believability can be quashed.
That contrast is what drives “Kiss of the Spider Woman” and makes each of its halves more effective. Molina and Valentin’s prison is cramped, and cinematographer Tobias A. Schliessler never misses a chance to remind viewers of how miserable it is to be incarcerated, and yet when we go to the movies with Molina, the colors burst off the screen in a rich and vivid homage to the MGM musical of old. The violence in the prison becomes more brutal when compared to the glitzy dances and costumes of the movie-within-a-movie; when the guards torture Valentin, he turns black and blue, but wounds on his movie counterpart are bright and artificial.
But as Molina feels the walls closing in around him and his escapism becomes that much more desperate, the lines begin to blur. He has already imagined both himself and Valentin in “Kiss of the Spider Woman” alongside Ingrid Luna, but as time goes on, he begins to see both Luna and the Spider Woman outside of his imagination. In the fantastic “Where You Are”—one of the few songs sung outside the movie-within-a-movie—Molina prays to Luna to save him, and she provides his salvation in the form of a song about, uh… how to disassociate. The dancers writhe to the sound of tasers, transformed from weapons into beats to catch. A gun becomes a mere prop and the guards actors as Molina, in a desperate attempt to control his life, imagines himself as their director. Later, high on morphine, he will imagine the Spider Woman hovering over his hospital bed as a specter of death. It’s these clever bits of editing from Brian A. Kates that give the film a feeling of frantic momentum as Molina, now in love with Valentin, hurtles headlong into whatever his fate may be.
Not all of these moments work, and there are some clunky lines in the script that feel more suited for the stage than a movie (and, admittedly, some are almost directly lifted from cut songs such as “Dressing Them Up” or “The Day After That”), but when it does click, “Kiss of the Spider Woman” soars. It’s helped by strong supporting turns from Lopez and Luna (Diego, not Ingrid), but the true star here is Tonatiuh, who expertly navigates Molina’s internal conflicts and burgeoning political awakening while grounding what could have been a caricature in real longing and heartache. And even in the few moments where “Spider Woman” missteps, it is a privilege to see a musical so bold in its messaging and so willing to use its oft-derided genre to go somewhere dark. Since watching it, I have found myself emulating Molina as my mind wanders back to replay moments from the movie—if I’m ever in jail, I know what poster I’ll hang up.
“Kiss of the Spider Woman” Trailer
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