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Hector Babenco, “Spider” Man
by Steve Warren
“I give a shit for the gay community!.. .Fuck
them!”
Hector Babenco is that rare director who
displays as much passion in an interview as his
actors do on screen. His fuse may be especially
short today because travel delays have put
additional pressure on his publicity tour for
Kiss of the Spider Woman.
At one point in the four-year process of
bringing Manuel Puig’s novel to the screen,
after Burt Lancaster dropped out of the lead
because of his health, Babenco considered
using Brazilian actors to cut expenses. Raul
Julia offered to learn Portuguese to stay with
the project, but then William Hurt came
aboard — at Julia’s suggestion — and now
Babenco speaks English. He has a good
vocabulary but pauses occasionally to check
his pronunciation, and grammar gives him
trouble when he’s excited — which is most of
the time.
Concepts confuse him more than words.
Why do people in the United States insist on
differentiating between the artistic and the
commercial? Banbenco wonders. “1 (do) not
consider myself arrogant enough to say that
I'm being an artist, and I don’t consider myself
so stupid at the point to say that I don’t like
money.
The question that prompts his outburst
concerns the reason for adding a woman to a
cast that, in Puig’s stage version of his story, is
limited to the two cellmates — Molina, the gay
window dresser jailed for child molesting, and
Valentin, the non-gay political prisoner.
Babenco works himself up to being
offended, then erupts: “You think that I put
Sonia Braga because she has a good pair of
breasts and everyone’s going to go to the
theatre to see her tits?...Yes, 1 wanted to put
Sonia Braga because I knew that a lot of jerk
off people were going to see my movie. Exactly
for this only reason. You can write. I can sign
on the bottom of the page”.
A moment later the volatile director calms
down and explains that while Molina may
envision himself as the heroine of the movies
he relates to pass the time in the cell, “The
listener has the rights to fill the shape of the
female character of the movie any way that he
wants, because in reality one is transferring his
emotion through the voice — through the
speaking — and the other is just being a
listener and imagining the movie.... Then it
would really make sense, if this man has a real
Raul Julia and William Hurt
love in life that he never had the courage to
recognize (Valentin loves the bourgeois Marta
rather than his politically correct comrade in
“the struggle"), to give to the same actress
(both roles)....
“It would be great to have William Hurt
play the Spider Woman. That would have
been another option that I had in my
head...but then I was facing again the
problem that the story was having one listener
— it was Raul Julia — and that he’s also
traveling to his fate in the moment that he’s
listening to the story of the Spider Woman.
And for me suddenly it was so clear that the
woman would be just the same all the time, I
had no doubt about it.” And so Sonia Braga,
who was the right age, available, Brazilian and
had never worked with Babenco, became the
three major female characters in Kiss of the
Spider Woman.
The next question to piss Babenco off
concerns Molina’s sexual profile. Would a
man attracted to mature machos like Valentin
be likely to go to prison for “corrupting a
minor”? The chicken hawks I know have no
interest in “old men,” and those who, like
Molina, want “real men,” wouldn’t fool
around with children.
“I never met your friends,” Babenco snaps.
“I’m sorry, I’m adapting a book.... I don’t
think in this way. I’m too much open-mind. I
can’t circumscribe things.... 1 can't consider a
human being who just like(s) boys, because I
don’t eat only spaghetti — you understand my
meaning? — or just Japanese food.”
As we try to explain the sexual
specialization frequently found in the “gay
community,” we find that we’ve struck a
nerve. “That is why 1 give a shit for the ‘gay
community!”’Babenco explodes. “1 have a lot
of respect for every one individual person, but
in terms of‘community’ 1 don’t give a penny;
sorry. Like I don’t give a penny for any other
community — Jews, liberal, Marxist, leftist,
anarchist, gays, lesbians, machos — I don’t
give a shit. I’m fighting exactly to destroy all
these categories in life and I’m showing this in
my movies and I’m risking my skin doing this
in movies like Pixote, in movies like Kiss of the
Spider Woman."
The “politically correct” crowd jumped on
him before the movie was even made. Babenco
continues. “I received a letter from the ‘gay
community’ saying that they read my script
and demanding a lot of changing in my movie
— like the Nazi party would be doing during
the repression in Germany in the 30's
calling my movie ‘degenerate’ because 1 was
betraying the gay ideals.' Fuck them!"
Being more specific he adds. “I received a
letter from a gay association (in Los Angeles)
telling that if William.Hurt is being passive in
the sexual relation there must be another
sequence (of exactly the same length) in which
Raul Julia is being passive in the sexual
relation.... Very tough letter.” He sent copies,
he says, to his closes gay friends.
“Listen," he cautions later, “don’t interpret
my words as against gays. My best friends are
gays. I’m just talking against — against the
corporation, because everything became a
corporation in the Nazi system. The
repression is about the gay ghettos.. .and this
is against the meaning of life. Sometimes you
need to protect yourself, you need to make
your league, your association: but things
(have) their own limits.”
A gay man Babenco holds in higher regard
is Manuel Puig, who he says is “noble.. .to
have the courage to write the books that he’s
writing. This is the way in which he is talking
about himself.... The most exposed character
is Puig.”
Homosexuality is a fact of life, not an issue
in Babenco’s films. One of the central group of
boys in Pixoie made Boy George look butch,
but he had no problem being accepted by the
others. Molina has a low self-image, but he
learns to overcome it is the course of Kiss of
the Spider Woman as the two cellmates
absorb each other’s better qualities and learn
to love each other in a way that transcends
sexuality.
Babenco believes his attitude reflects that of
Brazil, where he’s lived for 16 years. “Brazil is
a country with almost no sexual repression,”
he says. “Thank God we didn’t have the
colonization from the Calvinists, the
Protestants; and the Catholic church was very
liberal in Brazil. Then this mixing blood from
Africa and European - Portuguese —
people; we grew up in a very free society.
“No one’s scared about what you do when
you go home, and no one’s scared about what
you show in your movies. Never, no one tell
me in Brazil, ‘Are you making a gay movie?’
and I was listening to this question all the time
in America. Everyone who was reading the
script or the book or 1 was telling the movie,
said, ‘This is a gay movie.’ No, man, it’s not a
gay movie.... 1 said, ‘If you believe it’s a gay
movie it’s your problem, not mine. I know
Continued on p. 4
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