Jailbirds
Kiss of the Spider Woman (1985)
Saturday 16 July 2005
Author: Manuel Puig (1932-1990) grew up in a small town in the remote Argentinian pampas, obsessed with films and dabbling in transvestitism. At 23, he won a scholaship to study film-making in Rome, but soon dropped out. After a decade of writing film scripts, Puig returned to Buenos Aires in 1967 and turned a script into his first novel, a semi-autobiographical fable about a movie-world fantasist, Betrayed by Rita Hayworth (1968). However, the flamboyant Puig found it difficult to live in Peronist Argentina, and moved to Brazil in 1973 and New York three years later. Kiss of the Spider Woman was published in 1976. Puig remained in New York - as a high-profile gay writer he was regularly attacked in the Argentinian media - and lectured on creative writing at Columbia university. He finally settled in 1989 in Cuernavaca, Mexico, and died a year later from complications after a gall-bladder operation.
Story: Echoing his film script work, Kiss of the Spider Woman is written almost entirely as dialogue. Two men - a political radical, Arregui, and a gay paedophile, Molina, are imprisoned in the same cell in a Buenos Aires penitentiary. To pass the time, Molina recites the plots of his favourite films, beginning with Jacques Tourneur's 1942 horror movieCat People. Molina's camp fetishism initially irritates Arregui - especially when he realises another of Molina's favourites is a Nazi propaganda piece. Puig inserts a "transcript" of a meeting between Molina and the prison warden, revealing that the authorities have demanded Molina inform on Arregui. But as their relationship deepens (culminating in a sexual episode), Molina agrees to deliver a message for Arregui after he is released. A final "report" reveals that Molina is shot dead in the street as he tries to carry out his mission.
The film-maker: Hector Babenco (b1946) grew up in Argentina but settled in Brazil in 1969. He began directing features in 1975, but made a major international impact with Pixote (1981), an account of the appalling life of São Paulo street children. Babenco spent four years bringing Kiss of the Spider Woman to the screen, casting William Hurt in the pivotal role. (Puig hated Hurt's performance, despite his winning an Oscar.) Shortly after completing the film, Babenco was diagnosed with lymphatic cancer; his doctor, Dráuzio Varella, went on to write the prison stories that would become Babenco's most successful film, Carandiru (2003).
How book and film compare: Though the film's narrative generally sticks close to the novel it excises Puig's lengthy footnotes about clinical assessments of homosexuality, and replaces Molina's fetishisation of real movies with a single, fictitious Nazi-style piece, which is recreated at intervals throughout the story. Much of the detail of Molina's lifestyle is lost in the adaptation, and the "spider woman" is presented as another of Molina's films - whereas she appears in Puig's original as the final image of Arregui's own fantasy as he is tortured.
Inspirations and influences: As an evocation of high camp, Kiss of the Spider Woman brought gay cabaret style into mainstream movies, paving the way for American treatments of similar themes, such as Torch Song Trilogy (1988). It also marked a turning point for Latin American cinema, in the doldrums after the politically inspired cinema novo of the 1960s and 1970s.
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