1 film: Morrer Como um Homem 2 reviews João Pedro Rodrigues

A director must have a very good reason for making you sit in the cinema for two and a half hours. Alas, João Pedro Rodrigues, who is presenting in Rio his latest film Morrer Como um Homem (To Die Like a Man), did not.

To be fair, this half-surrealistic, halfnaturalistic melodrama of Lisbon’s transsexual demimonde, represented by seriously ill drag-club singer Tonia (Fernando Santos), her junkie lover Rosário (Alexander David) and her lunatic homosexual son Zé Maria (Chandra Malatitch), does have some strengths, particularly the sensitive portrayal of a falling star unable to reconcile herself with the loss of her former fame. This is, however, only partially developed, remaining somewhat floating in the air.

Unfortunately the director often overshoots his mark, running ahead, meandering and then suddenly stopping (there are scenes featuring whole songs, lasting as long as five minutes), only to eventually lose his track. There is no real message hidden in the tangle of Tonia’s false curls, which is all the more disappointing given the potential for extraordinary stories the world of these characters contains.

Dominika Uhríková

As an absent dad-andmom and full-time lover, the tragic drag queen of Portuguese director Joao Pedro Rodrigues’s To Die Like a Man plays an impossible game. With an intention which avoids idealism and cliches, the film stages an uncomfortable story, approaching the body as a complex weave of textures. Indeed it goes beyond the gay theme and compounds an exquisite experimentation of image and space, with the protagonist Tonia being the body in which the boundaries always shift.

The film focuses on the twilight of Tonia’s career, showing his/her troublesome particularity. Tonia is both the woman who takes care of her little dog and her blond hair, and the man who abandoned his child, prays for him and, finally, dies. Tonia’s decline does not produce a sense of nostalgia but brings out openly the artifice of fantastic and surreal atmospheres. Creating a counterpoint between explosive environments and tragic stories, the film insists on building the transsexual body as an acute site of dissent.

Mary Carmen Molina