Kiss of the spider woman

National Review, Sept 6, 1985 by John Simon

Kiss of the Spider Woman

THE SUMMER has acquired its second allegedly adult hit with Kiss of the Spider Woman, hailed as a masterpiece by Janet Maslin of the New York Times and acclaimed with resounding enthusiasm by reams of other reviewers. True, it is one of the two or three films these dog days that do not address themselves directly to adolescents of all ages, but from this to the nonstop greatness Miss Maslin and her ilk perceive in it is a longer way than to Tipperary. Hector Babenco's film adaptation, with a screenplay by Leonard Schrader, of Manuel Puig's novel is the reduction of a fairly clever piece of high camp to a cross between substandard Hollywood and rather low camp. But the supposed seriousness of the theme, the exotic locale, and the homoerotic orientation (William Hurt's performance as an outrageous but eventually heroic queen won a bestactor award in Cannes, where cinematic awards seem to be determined by a spin of the roulette wheel) give the film all the cachet needed for reviewers to start gibbering about genius.

Babenco, an Argentine-born Brazilian filmmaker, scored an honest success with Pixote, an unassuming, gritty, mostly unsentimental film about the garish world of a sweet little juvenile delinquent who coasts, almost blithely, from horror to greater horror. The home-movieish aspects of Pixote (and they were many) actually made for authenticity, much as early Italian neorealism profited from its filmmakers' ingenuousness and impecuniousness. Kiss of the Spider Woman was made on a low budget, too--though perhaps not so low for Sao Paulo, where it was shot--but it aspires to a professional slickness it fails to achieve.

The novel first. Puig's work is almost all dialogue, more precisely duologue between cellmates in a Buenos Aires prison. Valentin Arregui, a young left-wing activist from an upper-bour-geois family, shares a cell with Luis Molina, a 37-year-old homosexual window dresser, given eight years for corrupting a minor. There are no descriptions; whatever we know emerges, or can be inferred, from their conversation. This includes detailed recountings by Molina of movies he loved, which he relates with occasional embroideries to his cellmate, who (lucky fellow!) was too busy making revolution to attend movies. But these narrated indulgences, in which Valentin participates by adding his own interpretations and embroiderings, help while away the time for both men, and also conjure up other worlds and hopes of freedom. Valentin forgets the tortures he has undergone and way again undergo; Molina stops worrying about his beloved, ailing mother. On the wings of movie kitsch, the prisoners escape their cell and, eventually, fly into each other's arms.

The novel has technical ingenuity. Five films are retold: Cat People; a Nazi propaganda film, Her Real Glory; The Enchanted Cottage--though this one, too sentimental for Valentin, becomes an interior monologue of Molina's; a lurid Hollywood horror film about voodoo and zombies, with a happy ending; and a Mexican love story with songs, a sentimental melodrama with an unhappy ending. There are variations: One narrative is interrupted by bits of interior monologue of uncertain relevance and provenance (Luis's? Valentin's?); all narratives, like the dialogue itself, are interlarded with lengthy footnotes, mostly summaries of conflicting theories about homosexuality, from Freud to the present day.

There are other interruptions. Also in dialogue form, but more theatrical, are talks between Molina and the warden; near the end, there is a lengthy police report on the surveillance of Molina, now freed, with the spies baffled by homosexual smalltalk (Puig's little joke); finally another, quite different, monologue: a dream of Valentin's after renewed torture and a surreptitious shot of morphine administered by a kindly doctor. Out of these disparate strands, Puig weaves a thing of droll and touching rags and pretentious patches (e.g., the footnotes, not so much distancing devices as special pleading, a Marcusean defense of polymorphous perversity) and the ultimate banality of the well-known homosexual wish-fulfillment fantasy: getting a "real man,' i.e., a very masculine heterosexual, to become your bona-fide lover.

To do him justice, Puig handles this unrealistic material with a certain resourcefulness. He uses any number of devices to suggest the merging, first, of the fantasies of the heterosexual and the homosexual, and then, gradually, of their psyches and bodies. At last, sexual union is meant to yield a humanizing fusion, whereby the masculine heterosexual is temporarily converted to sensitive homosexuality while the feminine homosexual achieves a spiritual virility, indeed heroism, and so each man grows in stature. Valentin's concluding dream, though perfectly heterosexual, nevertheless subsumes Luis's romantic, feminine, B-movie sensibility, viewed as an enriching element.

In the movie, thanks partly to a poor script, but partly also to the inapposite assertiveness of the visual medium, crudities and preposterousnesses proliferate. The action has been shifted from Buenos Aires to Sao Paulo, but dictatorships are interchangeable, and if the prison staple switches from rice to beans, no matter. Yet even in the book there were absurdities. For example, when the prison authorities want to make Valentin sick, they put much more rice (or beans) on one plate, and assume that the stronger man will take the larger portion. But Valentin gives it to Molina, who, although aware that it is poisoned, has to eat it, lest Valentin become suspicious. But what is there about rice (or beans) that makes portions indivisible? Why couldn't Valentin, upon Molina's urging, simply even out the size of the helpings? And when Molina eats the poisoned rice, he gets cramps, but not diarrhea; whereas, later on, when Valentin is similarly poisoned, he gets the worst possible case of the runs. Puig needs this, to give Molina a chance to play good Samaritan, but the diverse symptoms do not make clinical sense.