\u201cKiss of the Spider Woman,\u201d a sexual and scatological dazzler about an inmate\u2018s obsession with a favorite musical, sounds like the kind of thing some folks won\u2019t watch even if they, too, were locked in a prison for years. Their loss. In the spirit of the film, I\u2019ll try to change their mind.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s 1983 Argentina, the last days of a militarized dictatorship under which 30,000 people have been disappeared. Scraggly, severe Valentin (Diego Luna<\/a>) is a political prisoner with ties to the revolutionary underground. His new cellmate is a brazen chatterbox named Molina (Tonatiuh<\/a>), a gay window dresser serving an eight-year sentence for indecency in a public bathroom. They have zero shared interests. But to pass the time \u2014 and, more importantly, to get Valentin to put down his biography of Lenin and talk a little \u2014 Molina recounts the plot of a Golden Age spectacular starring the fictional movie star Ingrid Luna (Jennifer Lopez), a red-lipped, pineapple-blond beauty whose vintage posters brighten their wretched gray walls.<\/p>\n \u201cI hate musicals,\u201d Valentin complains.<\/p>\n \u201cThen I pity you,\u201d Molina says breezily, charging into the first scene.<\/p>\n Through beatings and starvation, poisonings and betrayals, all under the gaze of the oppressive warden (Bruno Bichir), Valentin and Molina escape into Technicolor in a desperate need for distraction. The writer-director Bill Condon<\/a> (\u201cChicago,\u201d<\/a> \u201cDreamgirls\u201d<\/a>) has savvily, unabashedly reworked the 1993 Broadway extravaganza (already a bold adaptation of the 1976 experimental novel<\/a> and 1985 Academy Award-winning drama). He\u2019s double-cast Luna and Tonatiuh as the film-within-a-film\u2019s leads and changed the imaginary tale from a Nazi propaganda flick to a melodramatic but moving South American romance between a glamour queen and a noble photographer. Its themes of love and sacrifice come to mirror Valentin and Molina\u2019s own relationship.<\/p>\n The songs themselves are the same rather-forgettable numbers by John Kander and Fred Ebb<\/a> who did a zingier job mixing fascism with feathers in \u201cCabaret.\u201d<\/a> \u201cLive inside me on a movie screen,\u201d Lopez\u2019s Ingrid sings, luring Molina to get lost in daydreams. Behind her, dancers gyrate like victims being electrocuted. (I wouldn\u2019t have minded more jolts of morbid humor.) Unhummable as the music is, its message has a spark: In the war for liberation, it\u2019s OK to take mental breaks.<\/p>\n In fact, pleasure is necessary, especially for the regularly tortured Valentin who seems to have been numb for a long time. (Communist memoirs don\u2019t stir the soul.) A hardline ascetic, Valentin won\u2019t even alert the medics when he\u2019s sick, in case they give him morphine.<\/p>\n The two roommates comically bicker about what scant pop culture Valentin knows, taking shots at \u201cRaging Bull,\u201d<\/a> Meryl Streep<\/a> and his own crass insistence that Ingrid\u2019s character, Aurora, is frigid due to some kind of childhood trauma. (\u201cOh, God, let her be,\u201d Molina sighs.) Yet, their conversation always pirouettes back to the gap between the real world and the movies.<\/p>\n \u201cI hate to break it to you,\u201d Valentine says, \u201cbut nobody sings in real life.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWell, maybe they should,\u201d Molina huffs.<\/p>\n Maybe in confinement they can\u2019t.<\/p>\n Condon smartly limits who sings and why and when. In the 1985 drama<\/a>, which starred Raul Julia<\/a> and William Hurt<\/a> (who won the Oscar for Molina), both men remained trapped in this horrible dungeon and never sang a song. On Broadway<\/a>, all of the characters \u2014 even cranky Valentin \u2014 crooned numbers the whole way through. But Condon draws a thick line between reality and fiction to highlight how much his leads need the freedom for radical self-expression.<\/p>\n \u201cKiss of the Spider Woman\u201d is about a lot of things: Valentin reconnecting with his emotions, Luis discovering that he\u2019s more than a self-described trivial sissy. (\u201cI cringe every time you make fun of yourself,\u201d Valentin growls.) But it\u2019s fundamentally about those scenes in which the palette and polish of the film shifts and cinematographer Tobias A. Schliessler<\/a> switches from handheld to Steadicam. The putrid chamber drama becomes a fantasia, befouled rags turn into tuxedo pants and it\u2019s finally safe to belt how they feel.<\/p>\n Earlier incarnations of this story had activism as the end goal, Valentin for his principles and Molina for his new friend. Condon is more focused on their humanity. Caring for each other makes this bleak world worth fighting for. Without joy, we\u2019re already in chains.<\/p>\n People will come out of \u201cKiss of the Spider Woman\u201d gushing about Tonatiuh and with good reason. Striding confidently into his first starring role, the L.A.-born breakout talent is a bright new discovery with shining eyes and brash exuberance. He needs to be excellent for the movie to succeed and he\u2019s pretty darned close, even pulling off a glib beat where Molina recoils from a battered man and quips, \u201cIf I looked like that, I\u2019d want a bag over my head too.\u201d There are scenes where he comes off arch and a little telegraphed, although in fairness, that\u2019s also just who Molina is \u2014 performance is protection. And when Tonatiuh cowers from the guards, we get a hint of what Molina has suffered without Condon ever having to show the abuse.<\/p>\n To keep things faithful to 1983, Tonatiuh\u2019s Molina doesn\u2019t identify as transgender \u2014 the character sticks to the limited vocabulary of the time. But you see Molina\u2019s subtle disappointment when Valentin, trying to be supportive, insists, \u201cYou\u2019re not a monster, you\u2019re a man.\u201d And Condon has tweaked a climactic refrain, changing the pronoun to \u201cHer name was Molina.\u201d<\/p>\n Playing Ingrid-as-Aurora \u2014 the heroine of a film that, even its biggest fan admits, is \u201cno \u2018Citizen Kane\u2019\u201d \u2014 Lopez is shellacked under two layers of diva artifice. But at this point in her career, she\u2019s suited to being an icon. She\u2019s long since given up pretending she\u2019s still Jenny from the Block, and Condon has shaped the role of Ingrid to her like a corset. You hear it in the line, \u201cNo matter how hard Hollywood tried to make her all-American, she never stopped being Latin\u201d and more than that, you see it in Lopez\u2019s delight as she flashes her legs and tosses her hair. She knows she can nail this role and she really hoofs it. There\u2019s a wide-angle shot of a nightclub where Condon gives her and a dozen background performers a full, uncut minute to twirl. Most impressively, Lopez grabs a martini, slowly does a one-legged spin to the ground and then uncoils herself to stand back up and cheer.<\/p>\n She has a harder time commanding the screen in a third role, when Ingrid also acts the part of the sinister Spider Woman, a spiky-haired, taloned jungle goddess who smooches her prey to death. The movie\u2019s stiff Spider Woman set pieces are a relic of the \u201990s musical that put Chita Rivera<\/a> in a massive web. Trapped in them, Lopez can\u2019t do much more than a predatory grin. But it\u2019s still better than how Condon\u2019s \u201cChicago\u201d chopped up its choreography into close-ups (and here, there\u2019s still a few gratingly askew camera angles). The new film is the director\u2019s penance: an apologia to musical lovers who want to see the star do every inch of the dancing.<\/p>\n Still, my favorite performance has to be Luna\u2019s, whose Valentin is at once strong and vulnerable, like a mutt attempting to fend off a bear. He\u2019s the only one who doesn\u2019t need to prove he\u2019s a great actor, yet he feels like a revelation. Watching him gradually turn tender sends tingles through your heartstrings. For his second role as Ingrid\u2019s onscreen boyfriend, Condon resurrects a discarded number from the original musical where Luna croons about being \u201cAn Everyday Man,\u201d his warm voice perfectly imperfect. Even when he\u2019s grouchy and filthy, you get why Molina would imagine Valentin as the ideal romantic lead.<\/p>\n