Back in 1985, Héctor Babenco’s film Kiss of the Spider Woman garnered a bunch of Oscar nominations and a heaping side of controversy. During the AIDS epidemic, when gay men were publicly shunned as vectors of disease, merely showing two men having sex was enough to ignite a firestorm. Forty years later, that’s no longer enough to make a movie controversial, and yet the new Kiss of the Spider Woman (adapted from the Tony-winning Broadway musical, which is itself adapted from Manuel Puig’s novel) still manages to come at a fortuitous time, one that’s worth overlooking its shortcomings for.
If you’re not familiar with any of its previous incarnations, this film is set in 1983 in Argentina, where Valentin Arregui (Diego Luna) is a communist imprisoned for his role in a group trying to overthrow the country’s military dictatorship. His new cellmate Luis Molina (Tonatiuh) is a homosexual who’s given heavy incentives to ferret out information about Valentin’s revolutionary cohorts and report them to the warden. However, Luis would rather tell Valentin the plot of his favorite movie, a vintage 1940s Hollywood musical starring Ingrid Luna (Jennifer Lopez) that’s also called Kiss of the Spider Woman.
Against the prison’s squalor comes colorful, highly stylized reenactments of the film within the film, where Ingrid portrays both the modern heroine Aurora and an ancient South American spirit goddess, while Valentin appears as Armando, the rugged romantic hero who steals Aurora’s heart, and Luis becomes Kendall Nesbit, Aurora’s devoted and gay-coded personal assistant. Writer-director Bill Condon leans into the artificiality of the Technicolor musical, as the humble jungle village that Aurora and Armando visit is clearly a set. When Valentin is brutally tortured in the prison, Armando appears in the movie with only a single photogenic cut above his eyebrow. It’s all meant to be as fake as the blonde wig that Lopez wears through much of the film.
It could stand to be faker, though. Despite his experience directing musicals (Dreamgirls, Beauty and the Beast), Condon’s filming of dance remains stubbornly stagebound. You wish he would take a few more chances with the camera movements during the numbers, particularly with a Broadway show meant to be a tribute to the power of movies. Lopez remains a proficient dancer and sings the Broadway fare much better than she sang her pop records from the 1990s, but no version of Kiss of the Spider Woman is really about the Spider Woman. She’s supposed to be playing some feminine ideal in the mind of a gay man, and that’s difficult to do. No wonder Lopez’s turn here feels somewhat impersonal.
The men are on surer footing. Luna gives a beguiling rendition of “An Everyday Man,” and there’s a spellbinding moment after Valentin ventures into the prison yard for the first time after being tortured and hears two random inmates (Federico Salles and Alejandro Ernesto Balbis Ortíz) harmonizing on “Dear One (Querido).” Those songs were both cut from the premiere of the Broadway show and have been restored here, by the way.
The breakout star here, though, is Tonatiuh, the nonbinary newcomer from L.A. who uses either masculine or gender-neutral pronouns. He flashes real star presence during the musical numbers, most notably the finale “Only in the Movies,” and does stellar work as Luis, who does not have the vocabulary in 1983 to define himself as trans or gender-fluid or anything beyond gay. No matter. When Kendall rubs up against Aurora’s furs and laces and sings “She’s a Woman,” it’s the greatest expression of a man’s longing to be a woman in movie history. Also, Luis spends his one day of freedom going to a movie theater and watching Paul Schrader’s Cat People, a weirdly appropriate choice about transmogrifying humans.
Luis becomes a hero, too, when he realizes that his love of movies isn’t enough for the moment, and he takes a bullet for the cause and the man he loves. As he dies, he has a final vision of himself dancing in a crystal palace in a dress and heels like he always wanted. You can object to yet another movie where the LGBT character becomes a martyr — indeed, Kiss of the Spider Woman raises that very objection.
I’m not in the mood. Just as Luis freely admits that his favorite movie isn’t Citizen Kane, I’ll say that this movie isn’t in the same league as The Long Walk or One Battle After Another, which are also about surviving authoritarian regimes. It still means something, especially with the current White House despicably persecuting trans people and blaming them for podcaster Charlie Kirk’s assassination and other violence without evidence. That’s how the highly imperfect Kiss of the Spider Woman meets its moment.
Kiss of the Spider Woman
Starring Jennifer Lopez, Diego Luna, and Tonatiuh. Written and directed by Bill Condon, based on Terrence McNally’s musical book and Manuel Puig’s novel. Rated R.
