On demand: "Kiss of the Spider Woman"

Directed by Hector Babenco from a Leonard Schrader script, 1985's Kiss of the Spider Woman first presents as an expansion and gentrification of Manuel Puig's source novel - and maybe even Jean Genet's Un chant d'amour. Here are two prisoners in an unnamed South American country, one in jailhouse drag (William Hurt) describing to his hetero cellmate (Raul Julia) the bare bones of an old movie he recalls, not least for featuring "the most beautiful woman in the world". In cutaways, Babenco recreates said film with a mid-Eighties budget and Latinate bombshell Sonia Braga taking the kind of seductress role in which we're more used to seeing Marlene Dietrich, but there's slippage between Hurt's narration and what we can see with our own eyes. It's not just that there's an obvious discrepancy between the hot-to-trot Braga and our recollections of the coolly Teutonic Dietrich, but the Julia character raises the possibility that what's being described is, in fact, a Nazi propaganda movie, and that the jailbirds have been lusting over exactly the sort of fascists who put them behind bars in the first place. The film's narrative set-up is no less slippery - that central dynamic isn't all it initially appears - but it allows its multiple authors to riff on big, enveloping themes: the movies, memory and desire, those scraps we cling to and feast upon in our heads whenever our options are limited and times are tough.

For the most part, this involves two men talking in a confined space, which has perennially laid Kiss open to accusations of staginess. The book became a play before becoming a film, and later inspired a musical, and Babenco shoots much of it with an aesthetic conservatism typical of much 1980s American cinema. This retelling is founded on blunt, instantly graspable contrasts: buoyant blond versus brooding brownhair, masculine/feminine, the free-roaming liberties of the imagination set against the bodies of men in cages. Hurt plays sissified, Julia rageful, and both are working hard to be what they wouldn't elsewhere. Yet in the movie's subtler scenes, Babenco draws us into this unpromising space, and the conflicted hearts and heads of those we find there. Puig was writing about waiting for the worst to pass, be that rain, stomach trouble or the deprivations of an oppressive regime - and what Babenco films gradually comes to transcend that confinement. The movie-within-the-movie offers its own forms of escape: scale, luxury, glamour. (Another contrast: reality and fantasy.) But it's also another of the ways the two men care for each other, providing some measure of relief from their present predicament. The explicitly fabular mode of storytelling - which isn't really so far from a Princess Bride for adults - ensures its mix of the personal and the political remains more involving than, say, Costa-Gavras's Missing and most other liberal conscience artefacts of this moment, and you can absolutely understand why the movies have circled back round to this material in 2025: far from a period piece, so much of it is still so vividly in play today.

Kiss of the Spider Woman is currently streaming via YouTube.