There are certain things one expects from a prime-slot Sundance premiere. Crowd-pleasing character-based comedies, rural mood-over-plot dramas, provocative and probing documentaries; all tied together by the importance of an independent spirit, the reason the festival was birthed back in the late 1970s.
Sunday night then brought with it something a little more confounding: a splashy, Jennifer Lopez-starring, Affleck and Damon-produced adaptation of a Broadway musical combining Argentinian prison drama and technicolour song-and-dance setpieces. The inclusion of Kiss of the Spider Woman on a lineup that has been noticeably edging away from a reliance on A-list names raised a few eyebrows – wouldn’t this have been a better play at a more commercial showcase like Toronto? – but it brought a welcome sense of the unexpected to Park City, grit briefly replaced with glamour.
The story takes place with elements of both, a cellblock-set drama that indulges in flashy fantastical escapes, based on Manuel Puig’s 70s novel which was turned into an 80s film, starring Raul Julia and an Oscar-winning William Hurt. It later become a Tonys-sweeping musical, written by Terrence McNally, and now this adaptation arrives at a banner time for the genre, as both Wicked and Emilia Pérez battle for Oscars. It shares superficial similarities with the latter – the theme of gender transformation, the combination of grounded crime saga and heightened music numbers – but it’s a far more traditional crowd-pleaser, inspiring a packed-out premiere audience to both applaud and cheer.
It’s not quite worthy of either but it’s a respectable attempt, a film that despite the current moment for the genre, still feels charmingly out-of-place. Director Bill Condon might have travelled to Sundance with his James Whale drama Gods and Monsters back in the late 90s but his work has since been known for its larger scale, mostly for worse. I enjoyed his smaller, yet still glossy, thriller The Good Liar but films such as Beauty and the Beast and two Twilight sequels carried little identity. Kiss of the Spider Woman is caught somewhere between these two worlds and Condon seems more comfortable operating on the grander side, dazzling us with his ode to MGM musicals while finding himself a little lost back in reality.
It’s a film about the necessity of escape, taking place in early 1980s Argentina as authorities violently crack down on those bravely speaking out against a repressive regime, including tireless revolutionary Valentin (Diego Luna). His political drive clashes with new cellmate Luis (Tonatiuh), a flamboyantly gay window dresser who would rather retreat to fantasy than deal with the horrors of the time. Given the current political hellscape, this remains a relatable tactic, but Condon is a little too reticent to lean into the true grimness of his setting, the film a little overly smoothed and sanitised, making the leaps into daydream feel a little less distinct and a lot less comforting.
Those leaps are centered around Luis’s obsession with a golden age movie star named Ingrid Luna (Lopez) and he starts to tell Valentin the story of one of her greatest films, an admittedly hokey tale of a glamorous magazine editor who finds herself at the mercy of a mysterious spider woman. While Condon’s vibrant musical numbers might visually feel a little more Pedro Almodóvar than anything more specific to the period, they provide a delightfully over-designed showcase for a beautifully well-costumed Lopez as well as a well-pitched Luna and Tonatiuh, who are cast as characters in the absurdly plotted tale told in Luis’s head.
The songs themselves, from legendary Cabaret and Chicago duo Kander and Ebb, are largely rather forgettable with some often distractingly ungainly lyrics (an earworm exception is the fantastically slinky title song) but the setpieces that surround them are bright and buoyant enough to mostly distract. Lopez, who hasn’t been recently well-served by her middling Netflix action oeuvre, is also a natural fit for the material and the knowingly over-the-top tone, a larger-than-life star perfect at playing one. Her background in music has largely brought more acclaim for her ability as a dancer rather than a singer but she pulls off both here. She’s an actor who has long spoken about her dream to lead a traditional musical and is clearly, infectiously, having the time of her life.
We’re in safest hands with Lopez and Condon when he’s playing in that sandbox as the cell-based scenes can be a little stagey and rushed in comparison. Luna is strong and able to switch between both modes well but Tonatiuh less so, the actor unable to switch off the over-emphatic acting that’s needed for the fantasy scenes when they’re back in reality, lessening the emotional impact of the tragic final act. The pair, and Condon’s film as a whole, inevitably suffer in comparison with Héctor Babenco’s original filmed adaptation, where dramatic stakes were that much more tangible, the progress of the central relationship that much clearer and the performances that much more effective.
The rockiness can drag some of the film’s two hour-plus runtime (which still, to the upcoming fury of superfans, removes many much-loved songs), but there’s something fascinating about the unusual, overstuffed, indefinable mess of it all, especially when compared with last year’s flat and colourless Wicked. A wider audience might not know what to make of it, but Lopez is undeniable.
Kiss of the Spider Woman is screening at the Sundance film festival and is seeking distribution
