riddle@ut-sally.UUCP (Prentiss Riddle) (01/17/85)
Someone just announced in net.music that a movie version of "The Kiss of the
Spider Woman" is being made. Wonderful! I can't think offhand of a book
that more deserves to reach a wide audience in movie form.
Since its scheduled release is many months away, let me urge everyone to go
out and read the book n o w , before the movie is out and the inevitable
comparative/contrastive debate ensues.
"The Kiss of the Spider Woman" is the title of an excellent English
translation of Argentine novelist Manuel Puig's "El beso de la mujer
aran~a". As was mentioned in net.movies, the basis of the book is that two
"very different" men are confined in a prison cell together and pass the
time by recounting stories from movies they've seen. Here comes the mild
spoiler: the prison cell is in Argentina under military dictatorship; the
two men are there on charges of political subversion and seducing young
boys, respectively. Most of what you learn of the characters comes very
obliquely, largely from what they say about the movies they are replaying in
their heads. The theme of homosexuality is prominent in the book and Puig
emphasizes it by facetiously including page after page of pointedly
inappropriate scholarly footnotes on the subject (as a red herring, I
think). The book operates on multiple levels -- political, psychological,
humorous, nostalgic, and satirical. It is also a love story.
And it deserves to be a movie if only because it is so much a novel a b o u t
movies. It'll be interesting to see how that is done -- will the director
re-create the old flicks that the protagonists retell in their cell, or will
clips from originals be used? We'll have to wait and see.
Highly recommended.
[Has anybody on net.motss read the book? If so, I'd love to know what you
think of it.]
--- Prentiss Riddle ("Aprendiz de todo, maestro de nada.")
--- {ihnp4,harvard,seismo,gatech,ctvax}!ut-sally!riddle
--- riddle@ut-sally.UUCP, riddle@ut-sally.ARPA, riddle@zotz.ARPA