In his 1998 monograph on gay male identification with the Broadway musical, Place for Us: Essay on the American Musical, D.A. Miller identifies the archetypal “showtune” as a mechanism for self-delusion: to whistle a happy tune or proclaim that everything’s coming up roses when one’s life is spiraling out of control is to engage in a “rhetoric of denial,” a mode of disengaging from one’s situation through the sheer force of sunnily-sung optimism. In their most lauded works, composer-lyricist team John Kander and Fred Ebb took this schism inherent in the form and ran with it. In Cabaret, Sally Bowles blithely sings through encroaching Nazi rule; in Chicago, fatal crimes of passion are subsumed into jazzy vaudeville acts.
Kiss of the Spider Woman, adapted from Argentinian writer Manuel Puig’s eponymous novel, may be the apotheosis of their social critique-via-showbiz. As in Puig’s novel, a queer inmate imprisoned during Argentina’s military dictatorship escapes the confines of his cell by regaling his cellmate, a political prisoner, with detailed retellings of romantic movies. The addition of flashy musical numbers escalates this dynamic further, reaching its apex with a dream-sequence ode to dissociation, sung by the diva who hovers over the incarcerated fantasist’s imagination: “You’ve got to learn how not to be where you are / The more you face reality, the more you scar.”
Bill Condon, screenwriter of the Rob Marshall’s film adaptation of Chicago and director of Dreamgirls, has brought the final entry in Kander and Ebb’s unofficial triptych to the screen, and in doing so highlights the dichotomies key to Puig’s work — between political resistance and mental escape, masculinity and femininity, repression and liberation — much more effectively than Héctor Babenco’s self-serious 1985 film adaptation (made prior to the existence of the stage musical). The production limitations of Condon’s independently produced film occasionally show too glaringly, and the delicate interplay between prison drama and Hollywood pastiche sometimes grates rather than glides, but Condon more often than not meets the lofty ambitions of his adaptation. The manifold political and psychological complexities inherent in the narrative are approached with a sure directorial hand and committed performances, and the musical sequences deliver heady pleasures that also add depth and texture to the core narrative.
In Condon’s screenplay, adapted from Puig’s novel and Terrence McNally’s book of the musical, movie-loving Molina (Tonatiuh) is serving a prison sentence for public indecency (a bit softened from previous incarnations, in which Molina had been charged with “corrupting a minor”), and has been moved to a new cell with activist Valentin (Diego Luna). This is an odd-couple situation; Molina is gregarious, effeminate, and apolitical, while Valentin is taciturn, masculine, and radical. Yet the two slowly develop a friendship built around Molina’s retelling of his favorite movie each night, a 1940s musical curio entitled Kiss of the Spider Woman, set in a non-specific South American country. This film-within-a-film stars Molina’s favorite old Hollywood diva Ingrid Luna (Jennifer Lopez) in a dual role as Aurora, a fashion magazine editor who finds love in the village she grew up in, and the Spider Woman, a mythical monster of the jungle who requires a sacrifice from Aurora.
The film is a campy counterpoint to the brutality of their day-to-day lives. The guards sexually harass Molina and threaten Valentin with interrogations and torture, and both contend with tainted food. Meanwhile, the warden dangles parole in front of Molina, who is desperate to return to his ill mother, in exchange for informing on Valentin. Molina, over time, falls in love with Valentin, who in turn develops his own affection for Molina, and so Molina attempts to secure his parole without revealing any sensitive information about Valentin.
This is thematically dense material, and Condon and the cast treat it with care and complexity. Molina, whose characterization veers uncomfortably close to a punchline at times in Babenco’s 1985 film, is portrayed here as both self-possessed and vulnerable, struggling to balance his treasured escapes into cinematic fantasy with reality, but ultimately finding a well of inner strength that is intertwined with his femininity and love of idealized romance. Valentin, wary and cold at first as a protective measure, likewise develops through his relationship with Molina, becoming more tender and giving in turn. The simultaneous flamboyance and steely strength of Tonatiuh’s performance, coupled with Luna’s slowly unfurling emotionality, make these characterizations fully realized for the viewer, and highlight a particular psychoanalytic theme of Puig’s novel: the liberatory, radical potential of finding the woman within the man and the man within the woman. The ironic final song of the film makes clear that “optimistic endings” are “only in the movies,” but Condon finds glimmers of hope in the bravery and fluidity of these central characters.
Most of the film’s musical numbers occur within the Hollywood fantasy — a bizarre amalgam of Funny Face, Gilda, and Cat People — that Molina spins. In addition to Lopez, who exudes classical glamour and Hollywood panache, Tonatiuh and Diego Luna also appear in these scenes, inserted respectively as Aurora’s gay-coded assistant and her love interest. Director of photography Tobias Schliessler attempts faithful MGM-musical pastiche for these songs, and partially succeeds. The dance numbers are set up in wide angles and in long shots, with the camera only moving to keep the dancers in frame. This is a period-accurate and welcome technique, permitting the audience to see Lopez’s bravura execution of Sergio Trujillo’s kinetic choreography, without the choppy editing that has become endemic to contemporary musical films. Aesthetically speaking, admirable efforts are made to emphasize color contrast and saturation in these scenes, resulting in a number of striking images, but the high-definition digital cinematography is an overall mismatch for the material. While there is no going back to three-strip Technicolor, one wishes there were something to be done about the flat, bright sheen that cuts off the submersion in fantasy so essential to the film’s thematic content.
Kiss of the Spider Woman’s most successful musical number is an uncharacteristic one, occurring entirely within Molina’s mind and on a bare soundstage. “Where You Are,” the aforementioned dissociative anthem, is filmed closer in style to Chicago or Cabaret, with a meta-cinematic presentation — the setting is conceptualized as a movie set, with Molina placed in the director’s chair — and more visible editing. Lopez gives a canny, Fosse-inflected performance here, and the visual spectacle she embodies is counteracted by precisely choreographed depictions of torture. It is frenetic and focused, alluring and excruciating, a perfect marriage of the pleasures of musical cinema with lacerating political critique. It encapsulates the best of what Kiss of the Spider Woman offers audiences: political urgency, emotional resonance, and spectacle that meets the eye with a direct, implicating gaze.
DIRECTOR: Bill Condon; CAST: Jennifer Lopez, Diego Luna, Tonatiuh, Bruno Bichir; DISTRIBUTOR: Roadside Attractions; IN THEATERS: October 10; RUNTIME: 2 hr. 8 min.
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