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Kiss of the Spider Woman

“Don’t allow anyone to humiliate you. No one has the right to do that to anyone.”

Two simple sentences that encapsulate the entirety of the dramatic push and tension of Kiss of the Spider Woman, a film which sees an impassioned but wounded heart (Raul Julia) slowly learning to understand and empathize with a battered, dreamy soul (William Hurt). Julia’s revolutionary is initially disgusted by Hurt’s lack of political identity and ideology, homosexuality and tendency to express from harsh realities into dreamscapes populated by re-contextualized propaganda films and pop culture iconography. Yet they eventually reach across the divide and change each other in profound ways. Not only does Hurt’s character become more worldly and manage to look outside his own pleasures and seek to help his fellow man, but Julia’s sees that sometimes escaping from the torturous present is the best of ways to keep your sanity.

As the film progresses and they eventually have sex, in a very chaste scene, it seems almost unneeded as an earlier moment captured the switch and showed us the growing tenderness between the two of them. Julia’s revolutionary is poisoned during his stay in the camp and eventually gets so sick that he defecates all over himself. Hurt tenderly takes care of him and cleans him up, all the while Julia keep asking if this doesn’t disgust him in disbelief but growing appreciate at this token of kindness in a prison which continually beats them both down physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually. Their kiss may have a little to do with sexuality, but it has far more to do with kindness.

So is Kiss of the Spider Woman all about two different men connecting and learning something from each other? A tiny bit, and a great deal of the pleasures in watching the film is dynamic conversations and interactions between these two colliding worldviews and archetypes. Yet there is something deeper going on here.

The marriage and mixture of fantasy and reality isn’t just a way to demonstrate the elaborate stories that Hurt spins out from memories of romanticized films he watched before being incarcerated. The ending, and the reoccurring use of Sonia Braga in the various roles, must hint at something far deeper and more lyrical. Maybe they’re there to highlight that the entire film is being told from the point-of-view of Julia’s character? Braga turns out to be his girlfriend, so naturally he would imagine her as the romantic leading lady in the various yarns. They’re like puzzle pieces that I haven’t quite figured out what they mean on a deeper level, but I’d love to try and figure out.

Since so much of the film is just two people having long dialog passages with each other in a jail cell, it should go without saying that the film would soar or plummet with two poor casting choices. Clearly, Kiss soars high. William Hurt turns in an odd performance as a gay man who seems to be less a real person but rather a concoction of randomly stitched together quirks and eccentricities that he uses to shield himself from the harsh realities of life. Like he has created so elaborate a fantasy world to escape into that he has become one of those idealized female heroines he adorns on his wall. It’s a colorful, extraordinary performance, and Hurt deservedly won critical acclaim and an Oscar for it.

But Raul Julia is no slouch either. His character may be less colorful, and he was ignored for it comes awards season which is a damn shame, but no less committed or affecting work. His transition from sweaty machismo posing into a poetic and heartbreaking idealist is wonderfully modulated. He may not get to be as mannered or theatrical as Hurt, but his work is no less extraordinary and involving.

In the end, Spider Woman manages to tell a story about enduring kindness and human dignity finding a way to rise above the worst of circumstances without resorting to liberal heart-string manipulations or coming across like an extended ad for Amnesty International. It’s a dynamic and emotional dialog between two separate identities who seem to symbolize so very much.
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Added by JxSxPx
10 years ago on 20 June 2013 20:29