Diego Luna plays a political prisoner during Argentina’s military dictatorship, and Tonatiuh is the gay cellmate who escapes harsh reality by taking refuge in cinematic fantasy.
A touching dedication at the end of Kiss of the Spider Woman reads simply: “To Fred, Terrence and Chita.” These are lyricist Fred Ebb, playwright Terrence McNally and original star Chita Rivera, key figures behind the 1993 Broadway musical, along with composer John Kander and stage director Harold Prince. The show won seven Tony Awards and ran for just over two years, though critics and audiences were divided, and it is largely considered a second-rate musical by the standards of Kander and Ebb, the celebrated team behind Cabaret and Chicago.
Director: Bill Condon
Writers: Bill Condon, Terrence McNally, Manuel Puig
Stars: Jennifer Lopez, Diego Luna, Tonatiuh
Bill Condon has a difficult task in trying to transform the complicated material into a great movie musical, but thanks in part to the laudable work of his three leads, he occasionally comes close. The writer-director takes up an idea that worked well in his script for Chicago (2002): a parallel between misery and splendor, with central characters trapped in a bleak reality who seek escape through the musical fantasy of Hollywood's Golden Age.
In the play, set in Argentina in 1983, political prisoner Valentín Arregui is transferred to a cell already occupied by Luis Molina, a gay window dresser convicted on trumped-up charges of public indecency. In Hector Babenco's 1985 film, which earned William Hurt a best actor Oscar for his role as Molina, and in Manuel Puig's novel on which it was based, the two prisoners are already cellmates when the story begins.
Condon’s script makes the small, seemingly cosmetic change of moving Molina (Tonatiuh) into the cell occupied by Valentín (Diego Luna), under orders from the prison warden (Bruno Bichir) to extract information from the leftist revolutionary, part of a group of rebels trying to overthrow the military dictatorship.
That simple change means the fantasist is now thrust into the domain of the hardline ideologue, rather than the other way around. Whereas Valentín is initially hostile to his new cellmate, wanting only to read and think, not talk, Molina now has the role of bringing a feminine softness, light and warmth to the harsh environment. That lays subtle groundwork for a developing relationship between the polar opposites that is less transactional and more rooted in genuine feeling. It puts the emphasis on this being a love story.
But getting there can be a bumpy road. As compelling as Luna and Tonatiuh are in the roles, their scenes sometimes feel flat and stagey, only gradually gaining steam once Valentín accepts Molina’s friendship—and even more so, when Molina heals him after prison guards torture and beat him to near death.
Fortunately, they manage to escape from prison at frequent intervals in the film-within-the-film, which is where Condon’s flair for musical showmanship pays off. Molina is obsessed with glamorous movie star Ingrid Luna, known simply as “Luna” to her adoring audience, likely a few who remember her more and more. Unlike the stage play, where Molina would jump from one of his star-making films to the next, here he is fixated on just one of Luna’s films, the musical Kiss of the Spider Woman.
By weaving an entire narrative around that title, Condon heightens the metafictional aspects already present in the novel. It makes those over-the-top escapist interludes the beating heart of the film, bursting with Technicolor vitality, flashy production numbers and big, bold sentiment. It also allows the writer-director to reflect the plot lines between reality and fantasy more accurately, if sometimes a little forcefully.
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