You don’t come to Sundance expecting a splashy, jazzy, A-list powered musical like Kiss of the Spider Woman, with its glitzy performance by Jennifer Lopez and producers in Ben Affleck and Matt Damon. To be honest, the festival could use more projects sure to draw in audiences attracted to the star power and promise of something that feels larger than life and not like a film designed only to play in shoebox-sized arthouses. The second major film adaptation of Manuel Puig’s 1976 novel following the 1985 Oscar winner is a reminder of the showstopper Lopez can be when given the right role and the right director, in this case Dreamgirls filmmaker Bill Condon.
Set during the military dictatorship of 1980s Argentina, Kiss of the Spider Woman largely takes place in a decrepid cellblock, where left-wing revolutionaries and other undesirables are held in inhumane conditions and tortured for information on others threatening the regime. It’s there that Valentin (Diego Luna) has been kept in hopes that he will eventually grow tired of the torture and the mistreatment and give up others in his movement. His ideology and masculinity are challenged by his new roommate, Luis (a revelatory Tonatiuh), a flamboyantly gay window dresser and movie fan who is locked up presumably for deviancy but for other reasons he’d prefer to keep secret. While Valentin is a realist who sees the horrors of the time, Luis would rather retreat into fantasy and his love of movies.
Kiss of the Spider Woman is about how entertainment can be the escape we need when real life is too harsh to deal with. Luis is obsessed with golden age Hollywood beauties; his favorite being the fictional Ingrid Luna, a Latin diva who starred in his favorite movie, the cheesy camp musical Kiss of the Spider Woman. To pass the time, and to get Valentin to open up a little, Luis begins telling him the film’s story of a glamorous magazine editor, played by Luna, who falls in love with a political activist but makes an ill-fated bargain with a mysterious spider woman, also played by Luna. Her ability to play both villain and hero has Luis swooning every time he says her name. Valentin is less easily impressed, and fights back against these little diversions, mostly out of skepticism about Luis’ true motivations. But as the conditions worsen and the two men (Luis thinks of himself as a woman, which Valentin hates to hear) grow closer, Valentin finds himself needing the stories more and more.
It’s been a long time since Condon’s last great work, 2006’s splashy musical Dreamgirls, while his 2017 live-action Beauty an the Beast was a monster blockbuster hit. Most of his work has been forgettable in the time since, but he finds a groove with Kiss of the Spider Woman. The musical setpieces are vibrant and powerful, with Lopez twirling and hamming it up for the camera, owning every bit of her femininity and celebrity. The songs themselves aren’t especially memorable, though, even as Lopez, Luna, and Tonatiuh deliver solid vocals. Lopez has been on a good run of roles recently, including the Prime Video sports drama Unstoppable, but Luna is the role she was destined to play and the marketing will be built around it, as it should.
Things are less assured when Condon pulls away from the surreal and back into the lock-up. The film’s glossy sheen puts too fine a polish on the true horrors of the era, making the celllock scenes feel a bit too slight. It’s understanable why Condon, who also wrote the screenplay, would want to avoid getting too dark but it makes the transitions from fantasy to reality less definitive. Kiss of the Spider Woman arrives at a time when two blockbuster musicals, Wicked and Emilia Perez, delivered heartswelling and crowd-pleasing numbers wrapped around themes of identity. Kiss of the Spider Woman has more in common with the latter, and is similarly messy and thematically overstuffed while Lopez and Tonatiuh are the knockouts that will audiences demanding an encore.S
