Boundaries are constantly blurring in “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” the revolutionary mid-’80s film that became a Kander and Ebb musical, and that cunningly (and stunningly) morphs back to the big screen, courtesy of “Dreamgirls” director Bill Condon. Confined mostly to an Argentine detention facility in 1983, at the height of the country’s Dirty War, the show is the flip side of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Evita,” focusing on the brutal military regime that followed Eva Péron’s ouster. Bleak as that may sound, the musical finds rare shards of light — and an unlikely connection — in the most despairing of places.
In every incarnation of Manuel Puig’s novel, cinema offers much-needed escapism from not only political injustice, but also the kind of biological prisons that oppress us. Sitting in the dark, transfixed the dreams unfolding on screen, filmgoers leave their bodies for a time, identifying with whomever it is they’re watching, regardless of gender. That’s a phenomenon that both drives and describes the allure of “Kiss,” in which head-in-the-clouds Molina (Tonatiuh), a sex offender assigned to the same cell as the activist Valentín (Diego Luna), spins tales inspired by classic Hollywood movies to ease their time behind bars.
The two prisoners could not seem more different when they meet. Long-haired and delicate, Molina moves like a woman, identifying with the Hollywood glamour shots he hangs on the wall (the first place we see Jennifer Lopez, who plays the Dolores del Río-like screen legend Ingrid Luna). Whereas Molina’s every gesture seems calculated for a camera only he can see, intense-minded Valentín can’t be bothered, neglecting his health for the sake of his cause.
Though the dissident resents the distraction, Molina was was strategically placed in Valentín’s room to extract the secrets he refuses to spill under interrogation. Molina shows no interest in politics whatsoever, and as his deal with the warden (Bruno Bichir) demonstrates, he’s not above betraying others for his own advantage — a duplicity echoed in his tales of the Spider Woman (also Lopez), the femme fatale of a (fictional) film he saw years before.
Molina worships “La Luna,” as he calls the star of that movie, annoying Valentín with his pop-culture prattle. “Why do you make yourself trivial?” asks Valentín, who spends his time reading, however futile that seems. No one leaves the prison’s political section, where most of the inmates have been hooked on morphine. Survival matters in this place, but so does protecting his fellow “desaparecidos” (dissidents abducted by the junta), and Valentín is determined to hold out, while self-deluding Molina plays housewife in a makeshift domestic charade.
Looking back on reviews of the earlier film and stage production, Molina is nearly always referred to as a “homosexual.” But Puig pushed back on that label from the outset, citing social critic Theodore Roszack in the footnotes of his novel: “The kind of woman who is most in need of liberation, and desperately so, is the ‘woman’ which every man keeps locked inside the dungeons of his own psyche.” Could this mismatched duo’s connection be described as a romance? In contemporary terms, Molina would almost certainly identify as trans, though that’s but one of the evolutions depicted in the film, which observes Valentín and Molina develop feelings for each other.
Following the lead set by Terrence McNally, who wrote the book of the musical, Condon is shrewd not to overexplain the pair’s relationship. Like the soft focus lavished on a Golden Age film star, a certain ambiguity goes a long way in letting one’s imagination complete the picture. Instead, where Condon gets specific is in showing the Technicolor fantasies into which Molina escapes.
Each time “Kiss” cuts away from the cold gray walls of the cell, it calls for a star who can vamp her way through 1960s-style song-and-dance numbers, the way Chita Rivera did onstage. Here we get no less a diva than Lopez smoldering in a three-pronged role (Ingrid Luna, Aurora and the Spider Woman), which should draw crowds who might not otherwise have a taste for musicals. And yet, it’s relative newcomer Tonatiuh who walks away with the show, finding both strength and vulnerability in a character who seems less frivolous with each passing scene.
As Ingrid Luna, Lopez embodies a kind of Latin American feminine ideal, which Hollywood only half-successfully molded in its Anglo image (as her blond hair and elegant Edith Head-like costumes suggest). Molina celebrates her in the song “She’s a Woman,” confessing what most viewers will have already guessed: “How lucky can you be? … I wish that she were me.” After each fanciful vignette, Valentín fires back his critique, calling musicals “pure propaganda” — an ironic line in a film that aligns itself not with “the ruling class,” but renegades and outsiders.
Condon is a wizard with actors, and with “She’s a Woman,” he gives Tonatiuh his Jennifer Hudson moment, letting the character’s inner yearning shine through every shot. Except with the title number, which features Lopez at her most fabulous, the filmmaker relies more on choreography than melody to make the songs sparkle. Condon, who also adapted “Chicago” for the screen, seems relatively restrained here, switching back and forth between the grubby reality of incarceration and Molina’s fanciful digressions (creatively translating “Dear One,” originally sung between the two prisoners and the women waiting for them on the outside, into an acoustic guitar ballad, “Querido”).
“Kiss” uses its production numbers in almost the opposite way that “Dreamgirls” did. In that film, music was a locomotive force that propelled the storytelling, as months or years might pass in a single song, whereas in this case, it’s not clear how quickly time is moving. Here, the format is practically operatic (though the music is not), as Condon pares the narrative back so his characters’ emotions can be expressed through song, repeatedly transporting the two prisoners to a more perfect world (as in the wonderful “Where You Are”).
In those cases, the film’s songs serve as a coping mechanism for Molina and Valentín, who imagine themselves in place of the male leads: Now clean-shaven, Luna doubles as Lopez’s love interest (who looks William Holden suave), while Tonatiuh stands off to the side, giving Cary Grant realness as he admires them both. Don’t forget, Molina has been manipulating his cellmate all along, trying to uncover the information that could lead to his release. And yet, as time passes, he comes to respect and even protect Valentín, turning his capacity to deceive against the warden, while negotiating roast chicken and other favors.
For Kander and Ebb, “Kiss” offered another “Cabaret”-style challenge, in which a grim backdrop (there Nazi Germany, here Argentina’s Dirty War) could be subverted through music and a seemingly impossible love story. In a world where the Academy flips for “Emilia Pérez,” perhaps another gender-upending musical has its place. Molina may belong to a long line of tragic queer characters, but this telling redeems that cliché, carrying the character’s transformation through to its logical conclusion — as Molina becomes a big-screen role model for all who see celluloid heroes as sensitively as he does.
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