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Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!cbosgd!ihnp4!ucbvax!decwrl!fisher@smiley.DEC (Gerry --- Terminally Inane)
From: fisher@smiley.DEC (Gerry --- Terminally Inane)
Newsgroups: net.motss
Subject: KISS OF THE SPIDERWOMAN.
Message-ID: <635@decwrl.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 1-Oct-85 18:12:04 EDT
Article-I.D.: decwrl.635
Posted: Tue Oct  1 18:12:04 1985
Date-Received: Thu, 3-Oct-85 06:04:23 EDT
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RE:  Review of KISS OF THE SPIDERWOMAN

>He [Hurt] neither looks nor sounds like he has been
>in Brazil long.  This is never more obvious than in a scene in which he is
>walking on a Brazilian street.  He looks like a newly-arrived American
>tourist.  If he doesn't seem Brazilian enough, he seems much too homosexual.
>If Hurt ever wanted to prove he was heterosexual, his performance in this
>film would do it.  His mannerisms are every bit as overdone as those of any
>black comic-relief actor in any '30's or '40's film.


I think that the review missed a crucial point.  Hurt isn't a bad 
actor.  He's playing a gay man who is a bad actor.  The whole film is 
a study of the way we internalize the hatred of society and put on 
the face that mirrors that hatred.  Molina knows darn well he's 
acting, but he turns the effeminacy on and off to keep his oppressors 
off guard.  Notice the difference between Hurt when he is telling his 
story about the KISS OF THE SPIDERWOMAN, when he is meeting with the 
prison officials, and when he is arguing intensely with his cell mate. 
He appears to be three different people; he puts on the performance 
that will keep him alive. (Besides, what the heck is "too 
homosexual"?)

As for Julia, he is so wrapped up in his revolutionary dogma, that he
ignores his own humanity (how he feels about his girlfriend, the
simple pleasures of a good meal, etc.).  He is putting on a
performance just as Molina is putting on a performance. 

I think that the reviewer missed the crucial flaw of the movie: the 
inability to project a sense of time and place.  All of Julia's 
ranting and raving is vague and boring.  What country?  What 
establishment?  What revolution?  How can we feel for this man 
shouting, "I must be committed to the cause," when we don't know what 
the cause is?  How can Hurt be out of place in Brazil, when the film 
makers did not make it clear that we were watching a film that took 
place in Brazil?

The result of this vague depiction of time and place is that we loose 
empathy for Julia's "cause," whatever it is, and empathize only with the 
timeless, "placeless," plight of homosexual Molina.  The film looses 
its symmetry.

			Gerry Fisher
                        ...decvax!decwrl!dec-rhea!dec-smiley!fisher
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Nashua, NH: Where the men are men, and the sheep are nervous.


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