Pathology Follies
To Die Like A Man
Directed by Joao
Pedro Rodriguez
Runtime: 133 min.
Not every gay
filmmaker is an artist, let alone a progressive artist. Portuguese director Joao
Pedro Rodriguez’s newest film, To Die
Like A Man, is the latest decadent exercise that film culture’s hipster
gatekeepers promote in order to control queer cinema discourse. This time
Rodriguez’s insufferable storytelling concerns Tonia (Fernando Santos), a
middle-aged drag queen with self-esteem issues. Tonia’s nightclub act competes
with younger queens (especially fierce Miguel Loureiro, as Paula); he contends
with a delinquent son (Chandra Malatitch) and a drug addict younger lover
(Alexander David); and he’s mentally preoccupied with his impending sexual
reassignment.
Tonia (born Antonio)
goes through camp dilemmas—Almódovar clichés without the charm or humor.
Rodriguez goes for shock, not charm (Tonia’s various humiliations);
transgression, not humor (a sex change is symbolized as origami, Tonia’s son
seeks outrage via military drag). His memories and fantasies feel interminable
because they don’t express Tonia’s feelings. Instead, they are Rodriguez’s art
challenges and embarrassingly obvious strategies of inconsistent style and
story tense: unannounced sing-alongs, distracting but unfulfilling visual
tricks.
None of Rodriguez’s
schemes are as dramatically or emotionally effective as Karim Ainouz’s 2002 Madame Sata, with its mesmerizing
performance by Lázaro Ramos as a nonplussed middle-aged drag artiste—a James
Baldwinesque figure who embodied gay Brazil’s social, racial and sexual
history. For Rodriguez, gay life is about pathology, not politics or
spirituality. He emphasizes Tonia’s freakishness, not her freakiness. There’s a
difference. The difference should define her humanity in moral terms. That’s
what his previous films O Fantasma
and Two Drifters lacked, but it’s
also what is always proclaimed by his hipster gatekeeper defenders.
Contemporary gay
film culture suffers from the promulgation of sordid, repellant ideas and
filmmaking: Rodriquez’s, Van Sant’s, even Gregg Araki’s one mishap, Mysterious Skin. To Die Like A Man is simply the latest of these Pathological
Follies. Tonia’s pathetic, predictable decline fetishizes disease and suicide.
These grim aspects of gay life predate the AIDS-era, yet Rodriquez’s
clinical-artsy sentimentality isn’t as insightful as Jacques Nolot’s
neurotic-poetic Porn Theater, nor
transcendent like Patrice Chéreau’s death-haunted Son Frere (both neglected by the gatekeepers).
Indulging Rodriguez’s
ugliness limits the image of gay life and gay culture to negativity and
grotesquerie. He is a flagrant obstacle to the expression of gay life struggle
and spirituality, neglecting lessons taught by Fassbinder and best represented
these days by Julián Hernández, whose Heavens trilogy defines gay manhood by spiritual
strength and doesn’t confuse the struggle for love of perversity. If
Rodriguez’s movies continue to be idealized and praised uncritically, queer
cinema will have a screwed-up canon.