Two people share the same jail cell: Valentin, a left-wing revolutionary, and Louis Molina, a gay window dresser, for being in the way of the right-wing Brazil military dictatorship. Valentin and Molina form a friendship, as Molina recounts a film about a French woman falling in love with a Nazi officer during World War II, and betraying her homeland for him. Unbeknownst to Valentin, Molina is spying on him because the prison Warden promised his release if he finds out about Valentin's revolutionary group. Molina is released, and Valentin tells him how to contact his group. Molina makes a phone call and a car stops to reach out to him on the street, but the secret police shoot and kill him in an ambush.
Hector Babenco's most famous film, "Kiss of the Spider Woman" is a dark, bleak and depressive 'kammerspiel' drama playing out almost exclusively in one prison cell, just between two inmates, Valentin and Molina, both played brilliantly by Raul Julia and William Hurt, except for a few flashbacks revolving around their past in freedom, and an epilogue outside jail. The film has strengths, but it is not without flaws, since their dialogues are too conventional, whereas the only more imaginative creative solutions are in the form of escapism: one subplot involving Molina recounting a film about a French woman betraying her homeland because she fell in love with a Nazi officer (as a parallel to both Molina's betrayal and the cyclic history of persecution of minority groups defying an autocratic repressive order in society) and a dream sequence about the Spider Woman. There is only one truly great line in the film, said by Molina, but it is indeed poetic and memorable ("The nicest thing about feeling happy is that you think you'll never be unhappy again"). The film tackles several agonizing moments between them, one of them including Valentin getting diarrhea from poisoned food, while Molina helps him change clothes. However, a fair share of the story becomes rather stale, monotone and too grey after a while, exhausting itself with this confined premise. Nonetheless, it is a quality and ambitious philosophical piece that makes the viewers think.
Grade:++
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