Brazilian filmmaker Héctor Babenco’s 1985 film “Kiss of the Spider Woman” is a hauntingly complex prison drama between two very different figures. Although there are not many common things between them, they cannot help but connect more with each other under their grim life condition, and then the movie becomes all the more compelling when their developing relationship turns out to be more complicated later in the story.

The story is mainly set inside a stuffy prison cell shared by Luis Molina (William Hurt) and Valentine Arregui (Raul Julia). While Valentine is a journalist imprisoned for his left-wing political activity, Luis is a flamboyant gay dude who happens to share his prison cell with Valentine, and the movie opens with Luis describing to Valentine about some old Nazi German propaganda film he watched some years ago. While he does not like Luis that much, Valentine listens to Luis’s story anyway, just because that makes his seemingly endless time in the prison a bit less boring.  

Even though he knows that old Nazi German propaganda film is an inherently bad flick, Luis has been mesmerized by the love story inside it, and he really wants to share with Valentine for showing more of his sensitive side. It is about a beautiful French entertainer who feels quite conflicted about her loyalty to her country and her love toward a high-ranking Nazi German officer, and Luis is particularly touched by how the heroine eventually follows her heart to the end. 

While he throws some sardonic comments on the movie story presented by Luis, Valentine gradually opens himself a bit more to Luis, and the story becomes more interesting as his personal story resonates with Luis’s personal story as well as that movie story described by him. Under the dictatorship of their mostly unspecified South American society, both of them struggled in one way or another, and they also had to choose between love and integrity not long before they got imprisoned. 

Around the narrative point where the relationship between Luis and Valentine becomes more solidified, we come to learn that there is something Luis did not reveal to Valentine from the beginning. This certainly adds some tension to their ongoing drama, but the screenplay by Leonard Schrader, which is based on the 1976 novel of the same name by Argentine writer Manuel Puig, takes its time as usual for more character development. While there is still some distance between its two main characters, we come to sense more of human connection developed between them, and that makes their ongoing drama all the more intriguing and poignant than before. 

The movie was incidentally the first English language film by Babenco, who rose to considerable prominence thanks to the critical success of his previous film “Pixote” (1980) at that time. After the critical considerable success of “Kiss of the Spider Woman” (The movie garnered four Oscar nominations including the ones for Best Picture and Best Director, by the way), he made “Ironweed” (1987) in US, but he eventually went back to his home ground and then made several notable films including “Carandiru” (2003).

 Besides making a fairly smooth transition to English language movie, Babenco also did a commendable job of generating a striking contrast between gritty realism and beguiling romanticism. The more the movie focuses on its two main characters’ relationship, the more we get immersed into their grim life condition from which both of them desperately want to escape. Luis’s movie story, which is often shown to us in soft sepia tone, comes to function more as an emotional relief for both Luis and Valentine, and we are not so surprised when they come to share a lot more between them than expected.

The movie is constantly supported by the powerful performances from its two different lead actors. Although he may look a bit awkward in the South American background, William Hurt, who won the Best Actor award at the Cannes Film Festival and then a Best Actor Oscar for this film, subtly brings human nuances to his seemingly theatrical character, and he also deftly illustrates his character’s inner conflict along the story without overplaying that at all. On the opposite, Raul Julia, whom I have always fondly remembered for his enthusiastic comic performance in Barry Sonnenfeld’s “The Addams Family” (1991) and its 1993 sequel, steadily holds the ground for his co-star with considerable intensity and gravitas, and he and Hurt never make any misstep as their characters pull or push throughout the story.

Although a number of supporting performers around Hurt and Julia simply come and then go, the special mention must go to Sônia Braga, who is simply unforgettable in her multiple roles. Besides playing Valentine’s girlfriend, she plays not only the heroine of that Nazi German propaganda film but also the titular character of the movie, who is the heroine of some another old movie described by Luis later in the story. While imbuing her three different roles with each own personality, Braga does more than holding her own place around Hurt and Julia, and the movie led her to a number of many various films ranging from Robert Redford’s “The Milagro Beanfield War” (1988) to Kleber Mendonça Filho’s “Bacurau” (2019).

Overall, “Kiss of the Spider Woman” remains as an interesting film to watch even though more than 40 years passed since it came out. Although I only watched it once around the 2000s before revisiting it yesterday via a Criterion 4K blu-ray copy, I found impressed again by its mood, storytelling, and performance during my viewing, and I guess that says a lot about its considerable dramatic power.