Cinema: Crosscutting Across Cultures

KISS OF THE SPIDER WOMAN

Doing hard time in a totalitarian state, the only thing a prisoner has a chance of retaining inviolate is his fantasy life. Of the two men pent up in a South American cell, Luis (William Hurt), a homosexual, has the easier time doing so. His secret life revolves around the fool’s-gold romanticism of old movies. To be precise, one World War II melodrama in which, as he remembers and recounts it, the Gestapo were the heroes and the French Resistance the villains. Luis, a decent, motherly sort of chap, doesn’t care about all that. He just loves the Huns’ glamorous nightlife and stylish livery.

Disgusting, snarls his revolutionist cellmate Valentin (Raul Julia), who is being tortured to betray his beliefs and his underground comrades. But perhaps he protests too much. For he encourages Luis to keep spinning out his scenario (which is visualized in wickedly parodistic flashbacks). Ultimately Valentin confesses that his revolutionary ardor is no less a romantic fancy than Luis’ old movies are. Both are substitutes for the more immediate and commonplace forms of love that elude these fantasists of impossible perfection. And both surrender to a final irony: real life may be the cruelest of all illusions, a fantasy-film star (Sonia Braga) could be a methodical killer.

Spider Woman was filmed in Brazil (in English), directed by the Argentine-born Hector Babenco from a script by the American Leonard Schrader and a novel by the Argentine Manuel Puig. This time the artistic melting pot bubbled to perfection. The film’s gaudily stylized performances (notably Hurt’s, which has grandeur about it), all its tonalities, both visual and verbal, are pitched one notch above the naturalistic. Thus Babenco may subtly explore issues, both political and psychological, that are usually dulled by moviemakers’ earnestness and self-importance. Full of sudden startlements and twists, the film is delighted by its own originality, its own shrewdly controlled outrageousness. If Busby Berkeley had ever made a movie about politics and illusion, it might have come out something like this infectious, sobering film. –By Richard Schickel

DIM SUM: A LITTLE BIT OF HEART

Mrs. Tam (Kim Chew) lives in the Richmond section of San Francisco, but she left her heart in China. Proudly unassimilated, Mom replies to her English-speaking children in impeccable Cantonese. Nor will she surrender to Occidental displays of emotion. To give thanks or praise or a show of love to her No. 1 daughter Geraldine (Laureen Chew) would be to compromise her matriarchal authority. She will only goad Geraldine to marry that nice Chinese-American doctor from Los Angeles. Then an old woman can follow a fortune teller’s prophecy and turn to the business of dying.

Everyone, everything else in Terrel Seltzer’s script is fully assimilated. And so Mom’s Old World neighbors play mahjongg with her, then go home to “see what Alexis is up to” on Dynasty. When Geraldine and her kindly, crumpled uncle (Victor Wong) botch a home-cooked Chinese meal, they wind up dining at McDonald’s. On the sound track, a zheng and a keening saxophone play a duet of The Star-Spangled Banner. One expects this felicitous cross-fertilization from Director Wayne Wang (Chan Is Missing), who was born in Hong Kong and named after John Wayne.

In his decorous pictorial style, Wang calls on yet another culture, for Dim Sum is, in a way, You Can’t Take It with You as it might have been adapted by the Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu. The eccentric Tam household is memorialized in painterly images: the wind shuddering through the curtains next to Mom’s sewing machine, the rows of shoes ceremoniously placed by the front stairway. Tradition holds firm in this house, and those who dwell in it, like Geraldine and Uncle, must be modern martyrs to Mom’s insistence on doing things the old way. Here is a life, and a film, built on small, telling gestures. A daughter dutifully brushes her mother’s hair. She cries from responsibility and, later, from relief. Her shoes are back in place. With such quiet artistry, Dim Sum proves how moving a still life can be. –By Richard Corliss