Kiss of the Spider Woman, 2025.
Written and Directed by Bill Condon.
Starring Tonatiuh, Diego Luna, Jennifer Lopez, Josefina Scaglione, Bruno Bichir, Aline Mayagoitia, Kevin Michael Brennan, Thomas Canestraro, Eduardo Ramos, David Turner, and Odain Watson.
SYNOPSIS:
Valentín, a political prisoner, shares a cell with Molina, convicted for public indecency. An unlikely bond forms as Molina recounts a Hollywood musical plot starring Ingrid Luna.
In writer/director Bill Condon’s adaptation of the novel/stage musical Kiss of the Spider Woman (from Terrence McNally and Manuel Puig, respectively, with lyrics and songs by Sam Davis and John Kander), there is a clunky fusion of reality and fantasy that doesn’t quite mesh as the filmmaker likely intended.
For those unfamiliar with the general plot, somewhere in 1980s Argentina under military control, Luis Molina (Tonatiuh) is tossed into a prison cell on the grounds of public indecency and suspicion of being gay. But he’s not a revolutionary. That’s his cellmate, Valentín Arregui (Diego Luna), with prison guards desperately seeking information from him that might be useful. As such, Luis has been tasked with earning Valentin’s trust in the hope that he will reveal information about acquaintances or plans, in turn receiving a lighter punishment.
Luis is also obsessed with movies, particularly musicals, and fantasizes about being a woman. This leads him to recount his favorite, which is depicted as a movie-within-a-movie, where Jennifer Lopez’s Ingrid plays a mysterious, gorgeous, and doomed Aurora. Luis believes that beauty is power and wishes he were her. However, the closest he can come is by rewriting himself as her loyal assistant, always an observer of her guarded love life and not yet a part of it, but there, quietly stanning, for lack of a better term.
The point of this seems to be to prompt Luis and Valentin into a dialogue about the merits of artistic escapism and expression within a bleak reality, where the latter believes that, unless one is part of a revolutionary cause, movies, fame, and Hollywood obsession are largely unproductive interests. As Diego Luna also becomes a character in this fictional musical, playing Aurora’s lover, Armando, the events of that story come to represent reality and other aspects of Luis’s mind. The musical even has a villain, the titular Spider Woman (looking the part with striking costume design), also played by Jennifer Lopez, who demands a sacrifice from whoever falls in love with Aurora.
This is such a plot heavy experience (and one that hardly seems concerned with actual Argentinian history, comfortable using it as an awkward backdrop for this story of secrets and explored identity) that the only time Kiss of the Spider Woman truly comes alive is when Luis and Valentin are in their cells, debating and discussing their outlooks on the world while developing a special connection to one another. Despite the glamorous costumes, Technicolor, and wide-shot dance numbers, the movie-within-a-movie primarily serves as a distraction, somehow lacking the emotional depth of the back-and-forth in the real world. It’s more of an interruption than anything, with tie-ins and signifiers that reveal who these characters are in the real world, leaving one feeling exhausted and ready to scream that they get the point.
There is one constant in the performances, whether it be Tonatiuh’s spirited expressiveness and ability to reveal new layers of identity to Luis as the film progresses, or Diego Luna in the more straight-faced role who finds himself more wrapped up in this story than he ever expected he would be, or Jennifer Lopez putting to use her bona fides as a popstar and singing catchy tunes (sometimes they are upbeat, other times they are icy and menacing).
However, Kiss of the Spider Woman attempts to do and be so much that, by the end, the characters’ personal journeys, the historical setting, and the two very different types of filmmaking never coalesce into a narrative that makes a full meal out of those ingredients. There are flashes of excitement and emotion, but also strange feelings of disconnection, with the movie-within-a-movie flourish coming across as a barrier to the narrative.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★
Robert Kojder
