Released in 1985, this powerful film took the world by storm. Set in a jail cell in an unnamed Latin American country, Kiss Of The Spider Woman was the first independent film to be nominated for four Oscars.
William Hurt, playing the flamboyantly gay Luis Molina, won the Oscar for Best Actor. He has been jailed for molesting a minor. His cellmate, the fascist revolutionary Valentin Arregui (Raul Julia), hates Molina and all his lifestyle stands for. Using the story within a story style, Molina tells Valentin about his favorite movies, including a Nazi propaganda love story film, his own love life, and small tropical island fables. The same actress, Sonia Braga, is featured in all of these retellings.
Later on in the movie, she appears as Valentin’s lover, a very neat trick that blurs the lines between the two stories even further. Molina’s storytelling not only passes the time for the two, it allows Molina to escape the cell and feel freedom again. As the movie unfolds, the two men find themselves being drawn closer as Arregui’s rabid homophobia slowly falls away. Finally at the end, both men have found themselves freed from the shackles of their own minds.
Now in 2008, Kiss Of The Spider Woman has finally been released on DVD. I say finally because this is a movie that I would include on my all time top ten list. It is the movie that started my interest in more off the wall, non-standard Hollywood blockbusters, the reason I enjoy independent films like Memento, Forgiving The Franklins, and Citizen Ruth among others.
Kiss Of The Spider Woman was the first movie to show me the depth of a story and the top notch acting. Compare it with a contemporary mainstream movie of the time, like Top Gun, which is all overblown music and action. The story and characters take the back seat to the ear-blasting soundtrack and cool fighter plane footage. I saw Kiss after I had seen Top Gun; it was like night and day. Kiss showed me there was more to a movie experience than a couple of hours of mind-numbing escapism. When it is done well, there is deep escape and thought-provoking experiences—the kind that can make you think beyond the superficial, knee jerk attitudes. Kiss of the Spider Woman is a movie that needed to be reintroduced to the world. All I can say is it is about time.
Not only has the movie been remastered; the two-disc collector’s edition includes a second DVD that includes the documentary Tangled Web: Making Kiss Of The Spider Woman, the odyssey from novel to film.
At 109 minutes, the documentary is almost as long as the movie itself. I enjoyed seeing how difficult it could be to turn a novel into a movie, especially one as deep as this novel, a movie that almost didn’t get done. The workings behind the scenes such as Burt Lancaster’s obsession with the project, director Hector Babenco and author Manual Puig having massive battles over every detail, even the lack of independent places to show the movie, they all played a part in the struggle of this movie, a struggle that helped take it from a movie to a masterpiece.
The other extras, including a mini documentary about putting Kiss Of The Spider Woman on Broadway, are well done and well worth the cost of admission.
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