Yuna@yuna_y

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Kiss of the Spider Woman 1985

Two men share a cell somewhere in South America, and the state outside has torture on its mind. One of them is Molina, a flamboyant gay romantic who went down for corruption. The other is Valentin, a stone-cold Marxist revolutionary. They should have nothing to say to each other. What they build instead is a private cinema. Molina narrates imagined movie plots, all that old Hollywood glamour, and the fantasies do double duty: they let Valentin find common ground with him, and they keep both men mentally somewhere else while betrayal and torture wait just past the bars. Escapism here isn't a hobby. It's the rope you hold. Raul Julia and William Hurt are the duo carrying it, and Hurt walked away with Best Actor at the Academy Awards for playing an openly queer protagonist. Do that math on a low-budget Latin American co-production from 1985, with no studio machinery behind it. The role wasn't a safe bet and he took it anyway. So when people treat a Madame Web prequel as the pinnacle of this kind of story, I think about how Kiss of the Spider Woman already did the harder version decades ago. Art as a survival mechanism, not a product. 4/5 stars.

2h

Yuna@yuna_y

Follow

Kiss of the Spider Woman 1985

Two men share a cell somewhere in South America, and the state outside has torture on its mind. One of them is Molina, a flamboyant gay romantic who went down for corruption. The other is Valentin, a stone-cold Marxist revolutionary. They should have nothing to say to each other. What they build instead is a private cinema. Molina narrates imagined movie plots, all that old Hollywood glamour, and the fantasies do double duty: they let Valentin find common ground with him, and they keep both men mentally somewhere else while betrayal and torture wait just past the bars. Escapism here isn't a hobby. It's the rope you hold. Raul Julia and William Hurt are the duo carrying it, and Hurt walked away with Best Actor at the Academy Awards for playing an openly queer protagonist. Do that math on a low-budget Latin American co-production from 1985, with no studio machinery behind it. The role wasn't a safe bet and he took it anyway. So when people treat a Madame Web prequel as the pinnacle of this kind of story, I think about how Kiss of the Spider Woman already did the harder version decades ago. Art as a survival mechanism, not a product. 4/5 stars.

2h