Kiss of the spider woman.

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.

The film, however, is chock full of such illogic, starting with the principals' cell, a spacious, semi-private affair, bigger than most New York studio apartments. Molina, not a drag queen in the book, becomes one in the movie; he has turned his half of the cell into something like a bordello, and wears outre feminine gladrags much of the time without, it seems, incurring brutalization from the macho guards. The Sao Paulo police force is apparently three or four men strong --we see the same ones repeatedly; and even a high-ranking officer is reduced to chasing after Molina in the streets. When Molina is released, he and his homosexual friends go to a gay bar, where one of them works as a female impersonator; in the novel, nothing so blatant. The final pursuit of Molina and his death are written and directed so you don't know what's going on or how to interpret anything. If Luis doesn't know he is being followed, why does he keep looking at his pursuers; if he does, why does he lead them to the revolutionaries? His death is staged with surpassing hamminess, with allusions to Christ abounding.

But, then, whatever has been added to the book to open it up and make it more cinematic is either nonsense or sheer platitude. Thus the scene with Marta, Valentin's upper-class girlfriend (played, along with the two other main female roles, by Sonia Braga, who is too old and revaged-looking), is pure persiflage. Valentin and two comrades are arrested in a subway station after he has given his passport to a leading revolutionary to escape with; but Valentin and the escaping revolutionary are so unalike in age and looks that the gesture is useless. Later, the man who is presumed to have escaped is put in the same prison as Valentin, who is supposed to see him from his cell and communicate this to his friends on the outside and so betray them. But the jailers always lead their new victim about with a black hood over his head, so he won't know his torturers; as a result, Valentin doesn't recognize him. But 1) torturers are too arrogant to worry about their victims' recognizing them, 2) other prisoners could easily tell the man who his tormentors are, and 3) how much brains does it take to figure out that Valentin doesn't have X-ray eyes?

And so on. But Schrader and Babenco's biggest mistake is to show only one of the five movies Molina relates to Valentin: the Nazi propaganda film. As Babenco crosscuts to bits of this film, we should see something glamorous that initially caught Luis's fancy and that he enhances with his own embellishments to triumph over dreary reality. Instead, we see a seedy, camped-up piece of shoestring filmmaking, mostly grotesque, in which we watch the love story of a supposedly gorgeous French chanteuse, played by the campy and cadaverous Miss Braga, and a dashing SS officer, played by what looks like a bleached-blond, effete male hustler with a collar two sizes too big for him. Furthermore, there is no sense of Valentin's gradually increasing collaboration on these evolving fantasies, which leads to the blending of identities. And the Spider Woman, in the novel, is first a casual reference of Valentin's to Luis, and then part of a psychologically intricate dream sequence. In the movie, she stars in a scene from another film Molina narrates, though this brief, solitary scene cannot carry the burden allotted to it; and the final dream, without the Spider Woman, is flat and trivial.

To top it all, Raul Julia (not bad as Valentin) and William Hurt (who starts out overplaying Molina monstrously, and then settles down to being merely boringly obvious) speak in their own voices--Julia's moderately Hispanic, Hurt's totally unaccented--while the rest of the cast, dubbed in the United States by hack actors with thick Latino accents, is bizarrely inconsistent. Much, if not all, of Kiss of the Spider Woman is the kiss of death.