1. If I had a choice, I would not use the term "love story" to call this movie, because of the capacity or content of the movie, the human emotions it conveys, and people to people. , About dignity, the message about love is far more than a love story.
2. The uniqueness of this movie lies in this. It is not that it uses extremely avant-garde experimental language, nor that it has an extremely intense theme setting. On the contrary, it puts an extreme situation in The threat of death in the cell and the story under the shadow are accurately and subtly conveyed in the melodramatic language.
"The Kiss of Spider-Woman" is a movie I love very much, and it is also the only Latin American movie in the sequence of this film class. If we have a bigger space, I will choose more Latin American movies to share with you, because Latin America is a social, political, cultural, film, and art that I have been obsessed with and beloved of for more than a decade. The field.
This film was produced in 1985 and is based on the novel of the same name by a very famous Latin American writer Puig. Probably friends who have read this novel and love it will have a little obstacle when they come into contact with this movie. This is a common practice. People who have seen the movie first will have difficulty in accepting the original novel, and have read the original novel first. People will resist when they accept the movie.
The relationship between this novel and the movie is even more unique in that the original novel is an extremely perfect and extremely original postmodernist work. When it is adapted into a movie, the time limit of the movie is inevitably formed. This kind of compression will make the readers of the novel feel very regretful. I personally have such a psychological experience, because this novel is my favorite novel. When I first saw the movie, I was very disappointed by the simplicity of the movie. , But when I watched this movie again and again, the love grew deeper and deeper, so that William Hurt (William Hurt) began to enter the ranks of my favorite film performance artists.
Regarding this movie, I chose it because of my love, but at the same time because it can also be called a moment in the history of cinema in a certain sense, and to be precise, a moment in the history of world culture, because it created a lot of First, or that it has created a lot of records. It is the first independent film to be nominated for Oscar for Best Picture. No independent film has ever entered the Oscar for Best Picture nomination sequence before. It is also the best actor in the history of Oscars who won the best as a gay male. The first film with the title of actor or actor. This extremely vivid and charming movie character created by William Hurt also won an Oscar for Best Actor, Best Actor at the Academy Awards, and Best Actor at the Cannes Film Festival. At the same time, the record of three awards with extremely different artistic tastes, awarding principles, and composition of the judges is also very, very rare in the history of world film.
There have been too many comments and too many studies on this film, just like the original novel adapted from this film, it has a large number of research articles discussing emotions, among which the most frequent words are "love" and "death". "," "Dream", "Revolution" can also be said to be a story of love and death, dream and revolution. Some people say that this is a story called the night of revolution and romance, but if we think of this as a story that took place in a prison in Latin America during the dark and dirty war, we feel that it seems to be totally different from romance. Dip side, but it is indeed an extremely charming romantic love story.
However, if I had a choice, I would not use the term "love story" to call this movie because of the capacity or content of this movie, or the human emotions it conveys, about people and relationships. The information about people, about dignity, about love is far more than a love story. If we use a love story to understand it, just like the wrong imagination that the title may produce, it is not just a so-called "spider woman kiss", it is a story about temptation, desire, love, body, or homosexuality. It's a story of the people of a great age, the souls of people of a great age.
Let me give you a brief introduction to the background of the video. Perhaps in this post-Cold War era, that is today, an important cultural feature of the entire world is the disappearance of the sense of historical depth. The distant past history, in fact, still lives in our reality in the form of ghosts. In other words, we often forget that our reality is deeply topographically constructed by that seemingly distant past history, and is still supported by them today.
This film has an extremely special story. It refers to the fact that after World War II, more specifically, after the victory of the Cuban Revolution in 1959, under the direct intervention of the CIA by the U.S. government, the entire Latin America has generally fallen into a military coup and military dictatorship. , Under the white terror of extreme right-wing domination. For Latin American historians, this period is called the dirty war period, because on one side is the repressive rule under the military regime, all the space for social speech is closed, and at the same time, large-scale secrets frequently occur. Arrests, secret imprisonment and secret massacres. During this period, within the middle-class community, things happen frequently that your relatives, your family, your friends, and your colleagues evaporate suddenly and never return.
It is a story in a prison that unfolds under such a big background. The whole story can basically be regarded as an indoor drama, because it only takes place in a cell. There are two men held in this cell. These two men are the leader of the revolutionary organization or revolutionary leader Valentin and the gay Molina who was imprisoned for indecent juvenile crimes. Their class status, political beliefs, and life Attitudes and life ideals are very different. Their being held in a space is enough to constitute what Sartre calls hell, that is, the other person is a hell-like situation, and the film unfolds in such a scene.
I want to go back and talk about the original novel. This is also the basic structure of the original novel. Molina and Valentin went from extreme aversion to each other and extreme incompatibility in the cell, gradually approaching each other, gradually understanding each other, and finally became A couple. The second aspect of the story is a very important aspect in the novel, that is, in the long night, in order to spend the long night as a way of leisure, the gay Molina tells Valentine’s favorite movie story. The novel is It is composed of five movie stories or retellings of five movies.
The most peculiar thing about the original novel is that it is a fictional novel, but this novel has a lot of footnotes, and some footnotes are even as many as several pages. These footnotes are medical psychology papers about homosexuality. From these footnote files, we can read how people perceive homosexuality at that time and before, and how to treat it as a physiological pathological report or a text of a psychiatric phenomenon.
Between the three texts, an extremely delicate narrative structure almost like a closed labyrinth is formed. The five films become the mirror image of the characters, the statements and reflections of the characters’ hearts, and when it becomes a movie , Which constitutes the layer structure of the film, the film contains the film in the film.
The original text that the director wanted to choose was one of the five texts in the original novel-"A Cat Woman", which was translated into "Leopard Girl" or "Leopard Woman" in Chinese. I remember the translation is "Leopard Girl", this movie It is a real Hollywood film. When the film was put into production, the contact with copyright was extremely unsuccessful, so he shot and produced a film by himself. It was also one of the five films in the original novel. A Nazi propaganda film.
The whole movie is unfolded in a layered structure, in the sense of a film in film, and the heroine of the film in film plays another female role in the so-called real time and space at the same time, that is, the spider woman. It can be said that this is a story with two male protagonists and one female protagonist, but this female protagonist has never really existed in real space, so it can also be said that this is a story of two male protagonists, or It is the story of a pair of lovers.
The film-in-film in the film continues the mirror image structure of the original novel, but is different from the complete structure of multiple nested mirror images in the original novel that uses five films. In this film, the film-in-film Just become a double mirror. On the one hand, it is a positive mirror image, that is, Molina's spiritual self-projection, because Molina repeats this famous saying in the original novel and in the film called "I always identify with the heroine." Therefore, the heroine in the story who changed her identity because of love, changed her political orientation because of love, and died because of love became Molina’s self-projection, and also became Molina’s final tragedy in the story. A presupposition or projection of destiny.
From another point of view, it is a mirror image of the opposite side. It is contrary to the statements about revolution and romance, love and death, revolution and dreams in the film. The negative use of love is a basic narrative structure of the film.
William Hurt, the actor of Molina in the movie, was a very important American actor at the time, and he was more active in the theater. When the director first put him as one of Molina's candidates, he was very hesitant. Yes, according to the director’s statement in the interview, he is too fit and handsome, and it is inappropriate to play such a rather feminine role. But after a lot of hesitation, he was still confused by William Hurt's acting skills and chose him to play the role of Molina.
And William Hurt, as a so-called straight man, had a lot of obstacles when he wanted to play the role of a complete or outright gay man in this story. The crew thought of many ways to get him to try to enter such a role or Realizing such a role, but in the end it was not the help of the crew that made him overcome the obstacles, but he himself completed a kind of understanding of this role. He said that I don’t have to understand the so-called homosexuals, I don’t have to play The so-called homosexual, I only need to act as a woman. He said that because in my mind, Molina is a woman who has fallen into a male body by mistake, so I only need to play a good woman. The identity of the triple movie emperor probably confirms to us that he played a very successful role in a woman, a woman in a male body. Of course, just like similar characters, this is an ideal woman, this is a pure female image perfect in imagination.
The film was shot in two studios set up in Brazil and the United States. Just like in the movie story, the entire crew lived in that cell for most of the time. During the rehearsal process, the two leading actors were very serious. They probably only put into live shooting after a lot of rehearsal of the scenes in the film. The rehearsal often reached four to six times.
The important rumor actually became the inspiration for many later online writings. During the rehearsal process, the two people often reversed their roles, and the two people reversed their roles to play. In many performances, William Hurt believed that he played the role of Watt. Lunting’s actor is actually more suitable to play Molina. He suggested that the director let the two of them go back together, but the director rejected this suggestion. William Hurt has been joking with his good friend, you see, I originally gave this actor to you, but you missed this opportunity.
It is precisely because of this method of shooting that the two protagonists have coexisted in such a small space for a long time, so that in the memories of the photographer, he said that before I shot this movie, before seeing these two people, it was very It is hard to imagine that the souls of two people can be so deeply and so intimately connected. This seems to have provided nourishment for many, many rot cultures, and provided a huge space for imagination.
This film has left many peculiar records in the history of film and the history of Oscars. At the same time, these records reflexively confirm the artistic achievements of this film and its possession in the entire film history and global cultural history. Unique location.
Back to the movie itself, this is a story of love and death, revolution and dreams, revolution and romantic nights, but at the same time it is one of countless true stories that have occurred in extremely cruel political reality and historical memory. one of the. The uniqueness and ingenuity of the film is that it not only uses the film in the film to successfully form the so-called narrative reality space and the narrative imagination space, or the process of multiple refraction and multiple inversions in the imagination space of imagination.
The film actually contains double inversion or multiple inversion in it. At the beginning of the story, the two people are completely opposite. They are completely different. It is impossible to speak in the same way. The idealistic passion of Valentin’s revolution and his strength and political conviction coexist at the same time. Of course, it is a certain What we might call straight male cancer today is a kind of extremely masculine, a certain kind of insistence on saying "be a man" and being a man. This is an almost declaration statement, the so-called "be a man" "You are not a woman", which in itself indicates a negative and degrading evaluation. So once in Valentin's eyes, Molina was a 100% self-willing and depraved person, and he was willing to dismiss himself as a woman.
And the narrative process of the whole film can be regarded as such a kind of "gender", such a stereotyped prejudice or stereotype about gender and power, about gender and power, about gender and value. change.
It can be said that in the end Molina became an actor and Molina became a devotee. On the one hand, he finally achieved his dream of an ideal woman in his heart and died for his beloved man. On the other hand, when he was an actor, when he accepted such a task of fulfilling the entrustment of others at the expense of death, he became a man. Because in Hollywood stereotypes, only men can be actors.
From the other side, Valentin, when he accepted Molina, when he accepted homosexuality, when he accepted Molina’s tenderness and responded to Molina’s tenderness, it can be said that he released him As the female part of his life, he began to be able to bear emotions, so in the end he still did not succumb in the face of torture. He still insisted on his faith in the face of the threat of death. In the last moments of his life, he dreamed of true love with him. The girls ran to the free beach together.
This is a very important reversal contained in the film, and this reversal is double or multiple. Through Molina, Valentin strengthened him as a male, as an actor, as a revolutionary, and as an ideal. Through Valentin, Molina finally practiced his love of romance, love of dedication, and the practice of ideal women. On the other side, the two of them became each other or played each other separately. This is the most important or most charming and touching aspect of the film.
The title of the movie is "Kiss of Spider-Woman". When we watch the movie, we think that "Kiss of Spider-Woman" or "Spider-Woman" is of course on Molina's side, because of Molina's kiss, or " With the kiss of "Spider Woman", Valentine finally could not escape the fate of death. This is still an ancient male-centered gender imagination, about the temptation from women, about femme fatales.
But in fact, in the narrative level visible in the film, we have already seen on the visual level that it is because Valentin kissed Molina and Molina died for him. Here, "Spider Girl Kiss" is no longer a temptation of a woman under the traditional gender stereotype, the temptation of desire or the meaning of sexual temptation, but also a certain fatalistic call, a certain kind of identification, The fate that cannot be escaped due to the deep inner choice, just like in the film, every time I see the last paragraph, I will still be moved. We see such a fragile narcissistic inactive Molina. So calmly arranging his own affairs, so calmly entrusting his mother to his younger brother, so calmly putting on the agreed red scarf, and going to the death place of his life.
At this moment, you will know that this is not a so-called sexual or physical temptation. It is a greater inner impulse and a moment of sublimation in human nature. We finally realize that something is higher than life, Something more valuable, so that we are willing to dedicate everything we have to it.
Puig is not a left-wing radical Latin American writer, nor is the director of this film a Latin American director born in the era of global radicalization. But despite this, the film still unambiguously shows the impression of that era, that era, the process of resistance chosen by people in Latin America, failure, resistance, failure, and resistance.
For Latin American culture, we have many ways of summarizing and expressing. My favorite way is that the best and most respectable part of Latin American culture is repeated defeats, repeated defeats, but again Repeated defeats and battles, this does not include any Ah-Q-style self-deception, does not include any cynicist compromise, but again and again from the place of failure, at the cost of sacrifice, the blood of the victim forms life The river, which is an important feature that Latin America is still unique in the entire world today, is still so unique and chic.
The first shot of the film is very interesting. It does not start from the character or panoramic space. On the contrary, it is a camera lens directly facing a wall of a prison cell. There are previous prisoners on this wall. We It can be imagined that they may no longer be in the world. The various writings, pictures, and traces they left on the walls of the prison cell. At the same time, the shadows of the iron windows are cast on this wall, the clothesline in the cell, The shadow of the clothes rack was cast on the wall.
The most creative thing is that this is not a gloomy prison scene that we can usually imagine. On the contrary, it is a sentimental and interesting scene full of visual beauty. In such an empty scene, Molina's voice-over, a voice-over about a romantic love story enters the picture. It can also be said that this picture is actually very tragic, but visually beautiful and accompanied by a narration of a romantic love story movie, it became the keynote of the beginning of the film. Moreover, the empty camera just forms an open physical space for the sound to enter, and the film in the movie prompted by the sound to enter. It brings us into a narrative tone in which dreams and reality are extremely conflicted but overlapped extremely harmoniously.
Throughout the film, we can do a lot of close reading, but there is no need to do these close readings, because the director uses the visual language of the film to tell the romantic love story or the story of love and death. We will observe that in the film, it shows that the relationship between two people goes from opposite to the final life and death. It is through the line of sight from opposite to opposite, from the mutual image passing through like nothing, to the final four eyes facing each other. gaze.
In the space, it is completely divided by two people by the picture. In the picture, the distance of the space is stretched as much as possible in the limited cell. When it gets closer and closer, the two people finally appear in the double close-up. In the double mid-range shot, the two finally have a symmetrical cut shot. This is obviously an extremely accurate but extremely accurate use of extremely subtle film language.
At the same time, I want to share with you a little bit more about the application of light and shadow in the movie. For a cell with only one high window throwing light into it, we can probably imagine that it can have a very rich expression of light and shadow. But a consistent expression in the film is that in most of the scenes, the director always keeps Molina in complete shadow, out of sunlight. Valentin was concerned about everything that happened in the prison, and because he was concerned about the fate of friends in nearby cells, he kept climbing up the window, and he kept trying to look through the window, so he was always in a light zone or A zone of light and shadow.
But what is very interesting is that with the development of the plot, as Molina's eyes, body, and behavior surround Valentin, and get closer and closer to Valentin, then a light where Valentin is formed is formed. The area attracts or pulls Molina, and finally brings Molina away from the shadow and into the visual expression of the light area.
Therefore, light and shadow have become a very important and consistent visual language in the film. It and the auditory element-Molina's statement, Valentin's impatience or the dialogue between the two, the element of sound space, and the film and reality in the film. The visual statement formed in the space is opposite to what we just talked about, from distant and close, from picture segmentation to picture sharing, together forming a complete structural sequence, making the two people close to each other, and finally arrives A kind of soul and even soul union has become a very convincing and contagious visual presentation process.
The uniqueness of this movie lies in this, not because it uses extremely avant-garde experimental language, nor does it have an extremely intense theme setting. On the contrary, it is an extreme situation, death in a cell. The threat and the story under the shadow are accurately and exquisitely conveyed in the melodramatic language.
It is here that we finally implement the last reversal of the film. As we said earlier, the story of the film contains multiple reversals. In this story, this multiple reversal is in the trap, the trap in the trap, or for The final overcoming of the trap becomes the ultimate theme of this film.
When the story progresses to the middle, maybe friends who watch the movie for the first time, or friends who are extremely attracted by the story, will be hit, because we find that Molina is not only a gay trying to seduce his friends, but he is also A trap of emotional desire set by the police. But in the end, it was not Valentin who fell in this trap, but Molina, a man who was ordered to perform emotionally and tenderly finally gave all his emotions and all his tenderness. This is the most profound reversal of "The Kiss of Spider-Woman". He plays the role of Spider-Woman. He thinks he is a Spider-Woman, but he finally completed his life by finally getting the Kiss of Spider-Woman and thus ended. His life.
This film is a beautiful love story, but it is definitely not what the four words of love story might include. It is an era, it is a mystery of human nature, and it is a beautiful mystery about human nature in human life.
dictionary:
1. Dirty War
Argentina "Dirty War": From 1976 to 1983, more than 20,000 Argentines were secretly detained, tortured, and killed by the Argentine military government. These people disappeared forever. In this process, the U.S. government is believed to be secretly involved in the process, and was supported by some high-level U.S. officials at the time. Agence France-Presse said Obama was the first US president to officially admit these atrocities.
2. Puig
Manuel Puig (1932-1990) was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1932, and studied at the University of Buenos Aires in 1951. Soon, he won a scholarship from the Rome Film Experimental Center to study film director in Rome. After graduation, he served as assistant director of several films. Puig began to engage in literary creation in the mid-1960s. In 1968, he published his debut work "The Betrayal of Rita Haywards". Puig is one of the few writers who write about gay life in Latin American literary circles. Unlike many other Argentine writers, what he describes is not the intellectual circles of Buenos Aires, nor the middle class of Argentina, but the most ordinary people, ordinary people in the middle and lower classes of society. They generally don't have much knowledge, they are frustrated in their love life and sex life, and they live in pessimism and disappointment. His works have absorbed the characteristics of popular novels and various modern art (such as movies, television, photography), formed his own unique style, greatly enriched literary creation, and attracted general attention in the western literary world.
View more about Kiss of the Spider Woman reviews
