Kiss of the Spider Woman

Two men share a cramped Buenos Aires cell at the height of Argentina’s military dictatorship, though only one makes any effort at conversation. Luis Molina (Tonatiuh) is an unceasing chatterbox, openly and confidently queer in spite of the omnipresent threat of violence. The other, Valentin Arregui (Diego Luna), is a grizzled veteran revolutionary, righteously correct and unmistakeably a bad hang. The latter only looks up from his tattered Lenin biography to admonish his cellmate and warn him against “getting any ideas” (though the insistent aggression of his heterosexuality would suggest he doth protest too much), while the former would much rather espouse the virtues of Old Hollywood at length. The pictures, according to Molina, have shrunk down too much to life-size. The present (1983, to be exact) practitioners of “character” and “naturalism” are unwelcome in his book. Better the musical spectaculars of a bygone Hollywood era, unashamedly shallow and daffy and all the more glorious for it. Arregui dismisses him on the familiar grounds that, indeed, people do not actually put their every thought and emotion into song in the drabber, bleaker world outside the screen. “Maybe they should!” Molina retorts.

In Manuel Puig’s 1976 novel Kiss of the Spider Woman and its song and dance-free 1985 film adaptation, Molina’s movie worship is a portal into fantasy, a framework to explore the push-pull of escapism and harsh reality that inevitably frames Spider Woman as a sincere act of movie love in itself (though the Nazi propaganda film Molina adores has been wisely swapped out for a traditional studio backlot offering). In short, it’s a natural jumping off point for a musical, and one that ought to fit the celebrated composer-lyricist duo of John Kander and Fred Ebb like a glove (in 1993, Spider Woman would mark a less cynical return to the territory of their Cabaret, with toe-tapping extravaganzas once again ironically framed against a backdrop of fascist power). It’s a pity, then, that in finally making its way to the screen, this rendering of Kiss of the Spider Woman is more enjoyably proficient than outright stirring.

Visual presentation is key, really. Director Bill Condon is a steady hand on his third go around with a big screen musical (after Dreamgirls and Disney’s live action Beauty and the Beast), and it’s refreshing to see his numbers largely dispense with frenetic editing in favour of carefully composed long shots that grant a good, long look at the lovingly artificial sets. Nonetheless, the look of the Technicolour dreamland of Molina’s reveries is dispiritingly antiseptic, even televisual, and the scenes set in the two cellmates’ reality don’t fare much better. We ought to feel the whiplash of careening from this grey hell into lush, sun-dappled fantasia; from lowest despair to euphoric heights, but the film’s two modes feel too much of the same world, connected by a smothering thread of digital smoothness. It doesn’t help that Kander and Ebb’s songs are pitched, unsatisfyingly, somewhere between pastiche and the real deal, a line that even the megawatt star power of Jennifer Lopez (as Molina’s largely imagined idol) can only walk so far. The results feel too ordinary to seduce us, as Molina has been seduced.

It largely falls to Tonatiuh and Luna, then, to keep us invested. Both appealing, emotionally transparent performers, they meet the task, with Tonatiuh (in the role that secured William Hurt an Oscar) maintaining a light touch without neglecting the myriad vulnerabilities Molina’s outward extroversion armours against. Meanwhile, Luna’s initial frostiness promises a great thaw to come, and the actor’s gruff warmth is worth the wait, though theirs remains an onscreen rapport of unmistakably platonic timbre. The pair has an easy-going chemistry, just not the kind the homestretch of Kiss of the Spider Woman requires.

Ultimately, this new Broadway adaptation is never less than watchable. One only wishes it more closely resembled the film-within-a-film Molina so lovingly describes: “Too ambitious, too many flavours in the stew!” Condon’s under-styled film could stand to borrow a few more flavours.