The Kiss of the Spider Woman

In the novel The Kiss of the Spider Woman, Manuel Puig, employs a very experimental narrative by telling the story mainly through dialogue with research-form footnotes as support along the book. He also includes the narration of several movies along the novel to accentuate and draw metaphors of the two main characters, whose intrinsic differences end up bringing them very close together. The novel is very well crafted and the relationship between the characters is humorous and complex. In the adaptation of this film, Hector Babenco, attempts to portray this, yet it is something particularly difficult to do in the limited cinematic time. The relationship of the characters in the movie seems much more theatrical and shock oriented than the way it develops in the novel, which follows a much more natural course. The film is surely attempted and achieved some interesting objectives, yet the excessive theatrical aspect blocks the plausibility that the book has. Regardless of these issue, the main problem that the movie faces is the language change in an attempt to reach a wider audience, yet remain in a Latin setting. Those are two things that in my opinion cannot merge. There are great adaptations that are translated to other languages, but they are also transported to that correspondent setting. The movie would achieve a greater verisimilitude if it would take place in an English speaking country, with no fake accents, and it could still remain appealing to the wide Hollywood audience, although that would end in a much more distant adaptation, which would have been hard with Puig as an active part in the making of the film. The film would have also worked a lot better if it was further from Hollywood, given its independent and experimental nature, and made into a true Latin American movie. The film does stand on its own, but at the moment of comparing it to the novel, it has a very far feel to the original impact that the book causes, and it has very little of the novels subtlety.