Uneven musical drama Kiss of the Spider Woman gets caught up in its own web

In this unlikely, uneven but intermittently fabulous musical drama, a Marxist revolutionary and a gay window dresser end up as prison cellmates during Argentina’s Dirty War.

Since the two men have nothing much to do but talk, we get a lot of back-and-forth about esthetics and politics, sex and love.

We also get big musical production numbers, which can be occasionally terrific, often distracting and sometimes just off-putting. (Do we need a snappy song-and-dance take on prison torture? No, we do not.)

American filmmaker Bill Condon has worked on several movie musicals, scripting Chicago, helming the live-action Beauty and the Beast and writing and directing Dreamgirls. Here he’s adapting a 1990s Broadway and West End hit, which was itself adapted by playwright Terrence McNally from the 1976 novel by Argentine-born writer Manuel Puig.

Puig’s work was also made into a (non-musical) 1985 film with most of the book’s sharp edges smoothed over. Thankfully, some of those edges make it back in here, thanks to a raw, real and revelatory performance by breakout star Tonatiuh, who works valiantly to hold all the movie’s clashing tones together — and sometimes even succeeds.

Initially, Molina (Tonatiuh, who’s worked mostly in TV series, including Hidden Canyons) and Valentin (Diego Luna of Andor) seem to have nothing in common. Molina adores musicals from the Golden Age of Hollywood, while Valentin, busy reading his political theory, dismisses them as “pure propaganda made by the ruling classes.”

“I hate musicals. Nobody sings in real life,” says the stern social realist.

“Maybe they should,” counters Molina.

Sure enough, as the horrors of the jailhouse threaten to close in on them, Valentin gradually lets himself be drawn into Molina’s passionate re-enactments of his favourite film, the titular Kiss of the Spider Woman.

In sharp contrast to the men’s grimy, grey cell, these fantasy sequences spool out in the bright, crisp Technicolor of 1940s and ’50s MGM musicals, showcasing the glamour of fictional Hollywood diva Ingrid Luna, known to her adoring fans as “La Luna.”

La Luna is played by 21st-century diva Jennifer Lopez. The actress, singer and dancer is stunning as a creation of pure artifice, appearing in a rotating series of dazzling outfits and lavish backdrops and flanked by a cadre of beautiful male dancers.

Sadly, the material Lopez is given (with music by John Kander and lyrics by Fred Ebb) is mediocre — the songs mostly forgettable, the dancing skilled but often generic.

La Luna plays two roles in these musical interludes — Aurora, the editor of South America’s glossiest fashion magazine, as well as Aurora’s seductive but dangerous shadow self, the spider woman whose kiss brings death. The two men also perform double roles, with Tonatiuh playing Aurora’s closeted gay assistant and Luna (Diego Luna, that is) appearing as Aurora’s love interest, a photographer who is a champion of “the everyday man.”

The song-and-dance half of the film begins as pure escapism. “Call it kitsch, call it camp. I don’t care. I love it,” says Molina. But we gradually see how the musical story is trying to weaving in parallels with the men and their lives under a repressive military regime.

This is underlined by their conversations as they sit on their hard metal bunks. The political becomes personal and the personal political as Valentin and Molina discuss the purpose of art, the nature of sexual identity and the unpredictable waywardness of love. Initially positioned as opposites, their intellectual positions start to converge as their emotional bond grows.

The effectiveness of these prison scenes draws on the men’s moving performances and the palpable chemistry between their two characters. These sequences are also a reminder that Condon, while he’s done a lot of musicals, first made his name with the tender and lovely queer-themed drama Gods and Monsters.

But paradoxically, the prison sequences are so good that the musical numbers increasingly feel like irritating interruptions, dragging down the film as a whole.

While Kiss of the Spider Woman wants to be about the power of storytelling, its story-within-a-story never quite connects.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca