Kiss of the Spider Woman: Revolutionary Transgressions

In Spider Woman, glamour and gossip are the essential stuff of political/sexual transformation; they cast their spell on the film’s characters, as on its audience, and all succumb. It was unprecedented in its fusion of a radical politics of sex with a sexual politics of revolution, through the ever-present medium of cinema, which Babenco ingeniously stages through doubling, as the movie itself splits into two parts, its imaginary film (the adaptation retains in its entirety just one of the five films narrated by Molina in the novel) providing the glamour that its realist prison narrative lacks.

At the center are two unlikely cellmates; Valentin Arregui (Julia), a profoundly heterosexual Marxist radical, and Luis Molina (Hurt), a movie-mad gay window dresser. Valentin, caught smuggling a passport to a fleeing professor, has been tortured in captivity; he is torn between a “movement girlfriend” and an upper-class lover. Molina, who lived with his mother before being arrested for “corrupting minors,” passes the time by retelling for his cellmate the plot of a movie he loves, like a flamboyant spider spinning a narrative web. Spider Woman is set almost entirely within their cell, with the occasional saunter through the prison when Molina is summoned to the warden’s office, revealing a sideline as a mole. The cell, however, is crucially enlarged, through flashbacks along with visualizations of the characters’ fantasies and of the melodramatic movie brought to life by Molina’s narration. Starring Braga as its femme fatale, the film within the film is a piece of Nazi propaganda, a World War II–era romantic thriller—the kind of movie that Puig, very possibly, once viewed with his own mother at the matinee screenings they frequented.

Spider Woman was an all-star endeavor. Babenco and Puig were already renowned, as was their cast. At the time of filming, Hurt was a new star, with raves for Altered States (1980), Body Heat (1981), and The Big Chill (1983). He would go on to win an Oscar for this performance as Molina, the outrageous queen obsessed with glamour and make-believe. A formula was thus set in place: live straight, act gay, win an Oscar. Julia was an established presence in the New York theater world, and would soon have pop-culture fame thanks to his starring role as Gomez in two Addams Family films. He also became a recognized political figure, much beloved as a cultural force both in his native Puerto Rico, as a pro-independence voice, and in New York, as a Latino activist; he was even recognized in El Salvador with an award for his activism (while there, he paid a visit to the grave of the martyred Archbishop Óscar Romero).

Finally, Braga was the perfect choice for the femme fatale in the movie of Molina’s recollection—as the fictitious actor Leni Lamaison (a name with a sly nod to Leni Riefenstahl, but here exposed as a full Nazi), she plays the enigmatic Spider Woman—as well as for the role of Valentin’s own beloved. She becomes the embodiment of his secret true love, Marta, the bourgeois woman from whom he parted for political reasons. Braga was already famous for her starring role in Bruno Barreto’s Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands (1976). Soon after Spider Woman, she would star in Robert Redford’s The Milagro Beanfield War, released in 1988. (The two were a couple for a few years, leading to a marked increase in the Latin American film presence at the Sundance Film Festival.) Many other films would follow, and she achieved new fame in her starring role as an elder activist in Kleber Mendonça Filho’s 2016 anti-gentrification fable, Aquarius.

The imaginary and, thanks to Babenco, fully realized film within the film offers an escape not only from Spider Woman’s harshly realist prison walls but from the imprisoned country outside. And it serves another function as well: as an object lesson in how to free the mind when the body cannot escape. Of course, the narrated fantasies offer an escape for the viewer too: a luxurious black-and-white detour into a realm of fantasy and eroticism, complete with plush sets and the incomparably seductive Braga.

At first, the campiness of Hurt’s Molina may be hard to accept today. Babenco was filming a decade and a half after William Friedkin’s The Boys in the Band made a hit out of swishy stereotypes that were criticized as dated even in 1970. Similarly, in today’s decidedly postrevolutionary era of repressive consolidation and lockstep correctness, Julia’s Valentin may strike audiences as hopelessly retrograde, a cardboard revolutionary out of step with contemporary ideas. Even the imaginary film that intervenes might seem old-fashioned in its notion of cinematic glamour, with Braga’s performance so over-the-top that she must be in on the joke.

But such judgments of Spider Woman would miss the point: that is, all of the characters and narrative threads of the film are themselves exercises in camp. Every single one. Julia camps it up as the homophobic, heterosexual failed revolutionary, all bruised ego and grandiose self-regard. Hurt has an easier task in camping up the collaborator, performing him with swish and swagger as a flamboyant gay man of the old school, while successfully meeting the challenge of making him relatable and lovable. Braga may have the hardest assignment: to camp up glamour and thus send up her own image, drawing a line between authentic screen presence and preening vanity. Even the warden and assistant warden exceed their roles and tip over into cartoons. And the revolutionary pals of Valentin turn into tragically camp versions of their idealized selves, misreading the cues to deliver catastrophe. Spider Woman trusts its audience to learn the glossary and parse the lexicon, adjusting accordingly.

Perhaps it’s the ultimate revenge of Puig and Babenco against the authoritarian governments that sent both abroad: to make fun of the jailer, to empower the jailed with transformative fantasies, and to envision a life that rewards, if only posthumously, those brave enough to step outside their assigned (cinematic) roles. Thus does the film take its audience on a journey from skepticism to belief, as its spell increasingly takes hold. By the end, Valentin and Molina have traded places: one, near death but rewarded by morphine and fantasy, reunites with his true love, while the other, radicalized by love reciprocated, makes the ultimate sacrifice and leaves fantasy—and mother, and cinema, and life itself—behind forever.

In a sense, Spider Woman’s narrative arc advances the idea that melodrama can trump history, that wishing can make it so, and that radicalism of the imagination can occasionally—under the right circumstances—overcome sexual and political impediments, even hostilities, to switch sides. (In the mood for love, indeed: Hong Kong’s grand master Wong Kar Wai has recounted that he chose to shoot 1997’s Happy Together in Buenos Aires because he was so inspired by Puig.)

Babenco himself never quite left the prison world and its conflicting values behind. Years later, in 2003, he made another prison film, Carandiru, that is far more violent and pessimistic. Without the fantasies, the later movie’s realities are much harsher. The exception to the overwhelming brutality of penal violence is a gay couple, who focus the contradictory forces of love and repression into a tiny ray of hope, inspiring a visiting prison doctor (based on the real-life Dr. Drauzio Varella, whose memoir was the basis for the script). Carandiru, set in a mid-AIDS, post-dictatorship Brazilian prison, is a study of brutality and diminished humanity. But not completely: as always with Babenco, love shows up.

Kiss of the Spider Woman was a resounding critical and popular success: Hurt’s performance won the top award at the Cannes Film Festival as well as the Oscar, and the movie received three additional Oscar nominations (Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Picture). It broke records when it opened in theaters in the summer of 1985, and it appeared on many critics’ lists of the best films of the year. Its rerelease is a powerful reminder that, for a brief, magical period, a cultural moment infused with literature, film, and egalitarian values was able to flourish to a dizzying degree, despite the many political forces aligned against it. And now, as it turns out, is the most perfect time for such a revival of hope and fantasy. Puig and Babenco were exquisitely tuned to the stakes of their moment; shaped by their cultures, they carried them along into parallel exiles, sharing wisdom and inspiration when they were needed so sorely—as, indeed, they are once again in our moment. Viva Manuel Puig! Viva Héctor Babenco!