Kiss of the Spider Woman: Pucker Up For This Fun Musical Remake

By Chris Knight

Rating: B+
There’s an old joke about Noel Coward getting the rights to My Fair Lady and taking out all the music to turn it back into Shaw’s Pygmalion. Something like that seems to be going on with the new Kiss of the Spider Woman.
The source material is a 1976 novel by Manuel Puig, which got off to a shaky start in its native Argentina thanks to its homosexual themes and criticism of military authority. The author adapted it into a 1983 stage play. Then a 1985 filmed version (set in Brazil) got an Academy Award nomination for best picture, and a prize for William Hurt as best actor.

Jennifer Lopez is the title temptress in Kiss of the Spider Woman

Next up, the 1990s musical (set in Argentina again), which went from Toronto to London’s West End to Broadway, where it won a trove of Tonys.

And now comes the movie musical, based on the musical, based on the novel. It’s directed by Bill Condon (Dreamgirls)..
This new one makes for a solid retelling, thanks in no small part to its talented cast. Diego Luna stars as Valentin, a political dissident and revolutionary who has been imprisoned by Argentina’s corrupt military government in 1983. His new cellmate is Luis Molina, whose crime is public indecency (i.e., he’s gay).
Molina is a chatterbox who decorates his bunk with a beaded curtain and his side of the cell with movie posters. They include one for Kiss of the Spider Woman, yet another adaptation, this one fictional and starring screen siren Ingrid Luna, played by Jennifer Lopez.

Molina is played by the actor Tonatiuh in his first major big-screen role. He engages Valentin by telling him the story of the fictional Kiss of the Spider Woman, a mid-century TechniColor musical that (in Molina’s mind and therefore on the screen) features Tonatiuh and Diego Luna as characters alongside Lopez.
It’s not as confusing as it sounds, thanks to Condon’s sharp delineation of setting. Even the aspect ratio changes when we move from the dreary prison setting to the remembered movie musical and back again. And it’s great fun to watch the two male leads morph between their prison selves and their flashy movie characters.
Lopez’s character of course only exists in the fictional realm, but makes up for it by playing two roles in the film within the film, that of the heroine Aurora and the dangerous Spider Woman, whose kiss means death. This requires costume changes galore, and she’s clearly having a ball in some of the more va-voom getups.
Don’t come to this Kiss looking for a trenchant treatise on gay rights or the role of the military junta, any more than you’d take in Les Miserables hoping to learn about the history of France’s June Rebellion.
And speaking of Les Mis, the songs in Kiss, mostly lifted from the work of John Kander and Fred Ebb in the stage musical, aren’t quite as memorable or bombastic as in that show. There’s a new number, An Everyday Man, sung by Luna and Lopez, that pops more than most of the older ones.

But these are minor quibbles. Kiss of the Spider Woman remains an engrossing tale in this new century, and a lovely paean to old movies and the thrills of getting lost in them. There’s even a sly dig at people who talk during screenings, when Molina asks Valentin to please keep it down while he tells the story of the film. Bravo!
Kiss of the Spider Woman. Directed by Bill Condon. Starring Diego Luna, Tonatiuh, and Jennifer Lopez. Opens Oct. 17 in cinemas.