Kiss of the Spider Woman: The Idealization of Memory

In Bill Condon’s “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” the jail cell becomes a chapel dedicated to longing, and the musical within is a fever dream sewn from sequins and sorrow. The film is a collage of adaptations — Manuel Puig’s novel, the 1985 film starring William Hurt and Raul Julia, and the Kander and Ebb musical — all folded into a lattice of spectacle and confinement.

Jennifer Lopez plays Ingrid Luna, Aurora, and the titular Spider Woman. She wafts through the musical scenes. Her appearances are decorative and ghostly. She is the web—the shining, gossamer, deadly object. The prison — which is located in 1983 Argentina — is a sepulcher of ideology and desire.

Luis Molina (Tonatiuh) and Valentín Arregui (Diego Luna) are cellmates brought together by unfortunate circumstances. They will gradually, inevitably, unravel. But now, they must learn how to orbit together. Molina’s Tonatiuh is a vision: tender, histrionic, and hungry for beauty. Luna’s Valentín is beaten and clamped down, a revolutionary who fights against the allure of dreams— until that is all he has.

Their conversation are rituals of resistance and submission, punctuated frequently by Molina recounting the Spider Woman musical — which in a film-within-a-film operates as both balm and poison. Lopez’s musical numbers are tightly choreographed, yet they never possess the ferocity of Chita Rivera’s Broadway original.

All the performances are polished and polite. The choreography (by Sergio Trujillo) makes the screen and its figures come alive. But there are movements, tantalizing ones, where true soul is almost there, palpable, but teasingly just out of reach.

Condon’s direction leans toward long takes and full-body framing. He lets the artifice breathe, but it is shallow. The musical numbers homage the classic Hollywood too much. They are so dated that they are mummified beyond relic.

The title “Kiss of the Spider Woman” is both a curse and a caress. It is the kiss that lures and betrays — and comforts. Lopez’s Spider Woman is a blank slate into which Molina’s desire is poured, and Valentín is reluctantly freed. The kiss is the possibility of remembering, a capitulation to fiction in a world too much to bear.

It is when the dream outshines the pain. Even as a remake, this Kiss of the Spider Woman is both reverent and restless, yet still viral. It pays homage to its heritage, even at the expense of becoming something ornate and distant. The musical parts, though ambitious, never deviate from the main plot of the prison story. The artifice feels grafted over the grim. It’s happiness and lightness that feel uncomfortably forced.

But, there are moments — fleeting slivers — when the film attains a haunted beauty. Just Tonatiuh alone is worth the trip.

This is a movie about the loneliness of being misunderstood, loving too much, requiring beauty in a world that punishes it. It is a slightly deformed jewel, flawed but gleaming. The kiss endures, even if the bite is never taken.