Kiss of the Spider Woman has had a long journey. It originated as a novel by Argentine writer Manuel Puig in 1976, which then yielded a play, a stage musical and an Oscar-winning film by Hector Babenco. Along the way, the story kept changing in content and form to suit the requirements of the medium.
The latest iteration is the 2025 movie inspired by the musical. Although making major alterations to the source material, the new Kiss of the Spider Woman retains one of the big ideas in Puig’s novel: personal transformation as a form of resistance to state repression.
Bill Condon’s Kiss of the Spider Woman draws on the director’s past experience of directing musical films. Starring Tonatiuh, Diego Luna and Jennifer Lopez, the English-language film is out on the Lionsgate Play streaming platform.
It’s 1983. Argentina is under a military dictatorship. Gay window dresser Molina (Tonatiuh) is imprisoned in the same cell as the Marxist dissident Valentin (Diego Luna). The placement is deliberate. The prison warden, taking advantage of Molina’s vulnerability, wants Molina to spy on Valentin.
The attempt is initially unsuccessful. Molina is a chatterbox while Valentin prefers the quiet. Valentin, a progressive activist who likes to analyse everything through social theory, also dislikes Molina’s self-deprecating ways and tendency to refer to himself as a woman.
If a man called me a woman, I would kill him, Valentin says. If a man called me a man, I would faint, Molina counters.
To pass the time, Molina lets Valentin in on his favourite Hollywood musical. The Kiss of the Spider Woman stars Ingrid Luna (Jennifer Lopez), whom Molina worships. Despite his contempt for musicals, which he dismisses as an opiate for the masses, Valentin is drawn into Molina’s telling.
Molina’s narration allows the movie to flee the dreary prison and leap into vibrant sets and songs centred on Ingrid Luna. The characters in the film within a film are also played by Tonatiuh and Diego Luna, allowing for slippages between the actual and imagined selves.
Unlike Puig’s novel and the first screen adaptation, Molina focuses on the memory of a single movie, rather than several films. This allows for a simpler plot and a more easily accessible exploration of queerness, the power of escapism, and the solidarity that builds between prisoners facing a common adversary.
Despite his misgivings, Valentin is drawn into the allegorical possibilities of the film with which Molina is obsessed. Molina too comes to regret his mission, thereby merging with the themes that he is exalting in the movie starring Ingrid Luna.
Although drawing warm notices, Kiss of the Spider Woman flopped at the box office. The 128-minute movie is a colourful and stirring chronicle of resistance, with striking choreography, songs sung by Lopez and Tonatiuh, and moving performances.
The musical sequences punctuate, rather than interrupt, the narrative flow. Kiss of the Spider Woman is the most tender in the grotty prison cell, where Molina and Valentin explore the comforts and limitations of fantasy. Diego Luna and Tonatiuh turn out aching performances, Tonatiuh especially magnificent as the deceiving, desperately sad and heroic Molina.
Also start the week with these films:
Why ‘KPop Demon Hunters’ is leading the Animated Feature Oscar race
The unbelievable, undeniable ‘Khoon Bhari Maang’
In ‘Rental Family’, an actor’s latest job is to imitate life
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