Watching “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” one thought kept crossing my mind – why has it taken this long for someone to put Jennifer Lopez in a musical?
Thankfully, director Bill Condon has righted this travesty. In “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” based on the 1993 stage musical, which is in turn based on Manuel Puig’s 1976 novel, Lopez plays the diva multiple times over. She is a movie star named Ingrid Luna – a vampy, musical siren a la Rita Hayworth or Marilyn Monroe. Half of “Kiss of the Spider Woman” follows the story of one of Ingrid’s most famous films, taking place within a Technicolor dream world of Vincente Minnelli.
But there’s another side to that colorful coin. The other half of the movie takes place within an Argentinian prison cell where a Marxist political prisoner named Valentín (Diego Luna) is suddenly joined by a new cellmate – a queer window dresser named Molina (Tonatiuh) who was arrested for public indecency. Molina, obsessed with movie musicals and Ingrid Luna in particular, begins recounting the plot of Ingrid’s film to Valentin in order to pass the time.
Unfortunately, it’s all too rare to see a movie musical these days that cares so much about the color and light that characterized the 1950s musicals “Kiss of the Spider Woman” is riffing on – the kind that doesn’t shy away from the cheese, that buys into the Fred Astaire style of shooting that shows the dancers in their full figures and rarely cuts away. But Condon doesn’t use the color and style of classic movie musicals for aesthetic’s sake. He must necessarily differentiate between the darkness of the prison cell and the world of Molina’s dreams. He’s able to do this by not just referencing musicals of old, but understanding how those classic musical directors used color to evoke feeling.
In one musical sequence that takes place within Ingrid’s movie, her character Aurora sings a song called “Gimme Love,” the show’s most overtly sexual number, down to Fred Ebb’s lyrics (“Gimme kisses, gimme love!”). But here the set – an abstract, artificial, and almost blindingly red bar, an homage to a number in George Cukor’s “Les Girls” – reflects that heat just as much as the words.
“The number that is specifically referencing ‘Les Girls,’ – in that movie, it’s kind of an Elvis number, a rock and roll number. But it was about heat. It was about sex, and that color perfectly represented that,” Condon said. “That’s what happens here, too. It was a lot about thinking like Minnelli, frankly. What would he have done with this moment? What color, what style would he have chosen?”
“Kiss of the Spider Woman” is as much about performance and escapism as it is the tension and touchpoints between reality and fantasy. As the movie progresses, the worlds begin to blend. For “Where You Are,” Ingrid, dressed to evoke Judy Garland in her famous number “Get Happy,” takes Molina out of the prison cell and onto a movie set.
The staging of the number, which features Ingrid and dancers in costume while a movie crew films the action, feels akin to Joe Gideon’s (Roy Scheider) hospital hallucinations in Bob Fosse’s “All That Jazz,” another film interested in breaking down the walls between performance and reality. As Ingrid croons about learning how to “not be where you are” – dressed as a woman who once told us all to “forget your troubles, c’mon get happy” as she struggled desperately behind the scenes – Molina finds it harder and harder to do so, at one point realizing the spotlight that follows them is actually a prison searchlight.
“[To be able to] resonate is what matters,” Condon said. “The story, all these musical numbers, have to resonate with what’s going on in the prison.”
“Where You Are” happens as Molina begins to feel more guilty about the role they might play in Valentín’s future. Their sharing a cell is not a coincidence – the warden has sent Molina to extract information from Valentin in exchange for their freedom. This secret complicates their already abrasive relationship. Valentín finds Molina’s interest in movie musicals to be frivolous, while Molina finds Valentin’s insistence on constantly studying politics boring. But these two, forced to be in close proximity to each other, slowly learn the heart of who the other is. Molina learns to appreciate Valentín’s stalwart integrity, while Valentín begins to appreciate what light can do for a person – and why someone in Molina’s place might value these films so very much.
While Molina is not explicitly labeled as trans or nonbinary in “Kiss of a Spider Woman,” they do often express their desire to be a woman, looking up to women like Ingrid Luna not as glamour girls to be adored, but ideals to aspire to. In the world of the movie within a movie, Tonatiuh (who uses he/they pronouns) also plays Kendall Nesbitt, a 1950s queer-coded friend of Aurora’s who feels a similar longing: “She’s lucky, she’s a woman,” he sings.
When tackling Kendall specifically, Tonatiuh knew just who to channel.
“I wanted to incorporate as much of my own history with it,” he said “Here’s this tortured soul, Kendall, who’s closeted. Who in that era had a similar vein? And I was just like, Montgomery Clift. That’s a great, wonderful throughline.”
If Lopez brings drama, and Luna brings honor, Tonatiuh brings compassion, delivering a charismatic performance that captures their characters in all their complexities. Molina and Kendall and how they interact with the idea of gender fluidity perfectly aligns perfectly with the film’s broader commentary on the intersection of performance and truth. For as much as Valentin initially derides the films Molina holds so dear, for Molina it’s not really about the glitz, or the music, or the dancing (although they enjoy that, make no mistake). Molina loves these movies because they represent a truth Molina has yet to find in the real world.
Classic movie musicals are filled with aesthetic markers of deep emotion– red so bright it fills you with lust, love so exciting it makes you burst into song on the trolley ride home. These are movies characterized by outward visuals that reflect inner feelings and truths. In them, Molina can find the truth of who they are, borne out in stirring fashion.
