It is occasional for a notable singer who also acts to avoid doing a movie musical for as long as Jennifer Lopez has. Beyoncé, Babs, Gaga, Madonna, e
It is occasional for a notable singer who also acts to avoid doing a movie musical for as long as Jennifer Lopez has. Beyoncé, Babs, Gaga, Madonna, etc. all did it within roughly a decade of their arrivals into the thin-air altitude of megastardom. (I mean, Streisand did it immediately; to be fair, it took Cher a lot longer.) One could argue that Lopez’s first large break, the lovely biopic Selena, is a kind of musical, but she was lip-syncing in it. Now, in her fourth decade of celebrity, Lopez has finally found herself in a proper melding of her two careers in Kiss of the Spider Woman, an adaptation of the Tony-bedecked 1993 stage show that premiered here at the Sundance Film Festival on Sunday.
Kiss of the Spider Woman is a strange property. It began as a novel, which was adapted into a lauded 1985 film for which William Hurt won a best actor Oscar. Then John Kander and Fred Ebb (of Chicago and Cabaret) tweaked the original text for Broadway, intriguingly complementing the confined hell of an Argentinian prison during the 1974-1983 junta with the frothy song-and-dance grandeur of ancient Hollywood. Their show is the basis for director Bill Condon’s 2025 film. It’s an odd melange, a swirling mix of tragedy, camp, political paranoia, and queer romance.
There is a plum part in there for someone like Jennifer Lopez. Actually, two parts: the twin specters of a long-gone movie star, Ingrid Luna, and the titular character, an otherworldly being played by Luna in a made-up kitsch musical. They are both manifested in the ardent imagination of a prison inmate, Molina, serving a sentence for a public act of gay sex. (That is the charge in this movie’s version; previous iterations of the story have him in the clink for corrupting a minor.) Luna is not part of the present-tense action of the film, but she looms over it as an angel or demon of escape, an object of Molina’s obsession who represents the heady desire to retreat from the harsh realities of the real world in favor of the false Eden of cinematic fantasy.
Or, at least, she’s supposed to. Condon has trouble with the story’s crucial juxtaposition. The prison-life portion of the film isn’t grimy and annihilating enough to stand in appropriate contrast to the deluding fabulosity of a movie recounted (or invented) by swooning, heartsick Molina. There should be a gloomy dichotomy here: Molina’s journey from apolitical nostalgist to lovelorn activist needs the truly dire nature of a torture facility to really sell the ornate and sinister beauty of his mind palace. Condon instead creates a space that looks too much like an apartment in the movie version of Rent, all carefully distressed flats serving as walls and delicately placed smudge. One watches Kiss of the Spider Woman and yearns for direction that goes rigid on the true mortal risk and folly of the story, its urgent cri de coeur about queerness’s central position in the struggle for societal liberation. It’s clear Condon vastly prefers the lush, faux-MGM trappings of the musical interludes.
The actor playing Molina, Tonatiuh, has a robust voice and cuts a dashing figure in the fantasy sequences. But in the prison-set scenes, they abet Condon’s Disney-fied take on the material. They’re a bit broad, lacking the hard-won grit and flint and sexual mettle that would likely animate a person living in these circumstances—in both Molina’s prison life and his life before incarceration as a citizen on the fringes of a nation enduring terrible, repressive times.
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