Central to Bill Condon’s “Kiss of the Spider Woman” is a film within the film titled “Kiss of the Spider Woman.” The inner “Spider Woman” is a shiny, extravagant musical led by Jennifer Lopez, and it stands in stark contrast to its carrier host, a prison drama haunted by torture and betrayal. Alas, neither the parts nor the whole quite work.
Linking the two worlds is Luis Molina (Tonatiuh, in a revelatory performance), a window dresser who was arrested on charges of public indecency with another man. He shares a cell with Valentín Arregui (Diego Luna), a dour leftist revolutionary who was imprisoned for his activities against the ruling dictatorship — we are in 1983 Argentina, at the tail end of an era of brutal repression.
Valentín doesn’t want to be distracted from his very important readings about Lenin, but tough: He’s stuck with a friendly chatterbox who has a particular fixation on the golden-age movie star Ingrid Luna (Lopez). Molina is particularly fond of her lavish vehicle “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” whose plot he recounts to Valentín, with the cellmates inserted in the celluloid dreamscape like satellites orbiting La Luna. That nesting-doll structure parallels the lineage of the movie, which is based on a Kander and Ebb musical, itself inspired by a 1976 novel from the Argentine author Manuel Puig. His book also spawned stage dramatizations and an award-winning 1985 film.
The biggest change from the stage musical, which opened on Broadway in 1993, is that Condon ditched the songs performed in the prison, thus creating a starker differentiation between reality and fantasy (the cinematographer Tobias Schliessler does a superb job of differentiating between the gritty 1980s and Molina’s Technicolor imagination). But the writer-director, working off Manuel Puig’s novel and Terrence McNally’s book for the musical, has also scrubbed ambiguities that made the story darker. Both Molina and Valentín are now wholly sympathetic, and the screenplay is more sentimental about the relationship between the two prisoners, which was shaded with calculation in the earlier renditions.
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