The summer has acquired its second allegedly adult hit with Kiss of the Spider Woman, hailed as a masterpiece by Janet Maslin of the New York Times and acclaimed with resounding enthusiasm by reams of other reviewers. True, it is one of the two or three films these dog days that do not address themselves directly to adolescents of all ages, but from this to the nonstop greatness Miss Maslin and her ilk perceive in it is a longer way than to Tipperary. Hector Babenco’s film adaptation, with a screenplay by Leonard Schrader, of Manuel Puig’s novel is the reduction of a fairly clever piece of high camp to a cross between substandard Hollywood and rather low camp. But the supposed seriousness of the theme, the exotic locale, and the homoerotic orientation (William Hurt’s performance as an outrageous but eventually heroic queen won a best-actor award in Cannes, where cinematic awards seem to be determined by a spin of the roulette wheel) give the film all the cachet needed for reviewers to start gibbering about genius.
Babenco, an Argentine-born Brazilian filmmaker, scored an honest success with Pixote, an unassuming, gritty, mostly unsentimental film about the garish world of a sweet little juvenile delinquent who coasts, almost blithely, from horror to greater horror. The home-movieish aspects of Pixote (and they were many) actually made for authenticity, much as early Italian neorealism profited from its filmmakers’ ingenuousness and impecuniousness. Kiss of the Spider Woman was made on a low budget, too—though perhaps not so low for Sao Paulo, where it was shot—but it aspires to a professional slickness it fails to achieve.
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