Worth: $16.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Gael Garcia Bernal, Roberta Colindrez, Perla De La Rosa
Intro:
The fantastic fight scenes are supercharged by heart-stirring drama and character analysis, blending various types of vicarious fantasy to show someone who took off the mask and became an inspiration for so many others to do the same.
While soap operas continue to have a specifically gendered reputation, the melodramatic ethos behind them can be found in many types of media. JRPG fans have Kingdom Hearts, horror fans have the Saw series, Hip Hop heads have the battle rap scene, etc. And for those with a taste for competitive sports (or who just want a non-sus excuse to watch big, sweaty blokes roll around the floor with each other), there’s the high-flying world of professional wrestling.
Cassandro, the dramatised debut of documentarian Roger Ross Williams (Life, Animated, God Loves Uganda) shines a spotlight on luchador Saúl Armendáriz (Gael García Bernal). Inspired by telenovelas, a love for makeup shared with his mother Yocasta (Perla De La Rosa), and his trainer Sabrina (Roberta Colindrez), Saúl decides to shed his lucha libre persona of El Topo and become an exotico drag performer in the ring.
Through Bernal’s tapping into the Chaotic Queer well that went into his turn in Y Tu Mamá También, and Williams sticking to his gut instincts on challenging orthodoxies, the film wraps Cassandro’s special variety of kayfabe in a flamboyant cloak of Gay liberation.
Cassandro is framed as a direct challenge to the macho masculinity of lucha wrestling, where exotico wrestlers are not only blasted with epithets from the crowd, but are usually set up to lose. Instead of using his on-stage persona as a shield between the world and who he really is, Cassandro instead uses it to enhance his true self.
While there are aspects of him embracing the role of a heel, letting all those boos and slurs become scales just to make his own blows hit that much harder, it also interlinks Cassandro’s utilisation of telenovela and wrestling theatrics, and a core tenet of Drag culture in gender-bending as a way to reclaim one’s own personhood in the face of persecution. And through it all, it crystalises that special secret that all fans of fiction know well: Just because it’s ‘fake’ doesn’t make it any less real.
Of course, this is still primarily a sport flick, meaning that all the off-stage drama largely exists to bolster what happens on-stage. Thankfully, the wrestling scenes are great, with Balo Bucio’s stunt team maintaining the flippy-dippy energy that separates lucha libre from its more hardbody American cousin. Bernal absolutely shines as the charismatic “Liberace of Lucha Libre”. Backed by choice Spanish-language covers of classic disco and glam rock, the sheer physicality of the action scenes is stunning all on its own.
Cassandro is a suitably fabulous tribute to a Queer wrestling icon. The fight scenes are supercharged by heart-stirring drama and character analysis, blending various types of vicarious fantasy to show someone who took off the mask and became an inspiration for so many others to do the same. It’s a vindicating depiction of why the idea that masculinity has only one face needs to be questioned, and at a time when drag performers and their LGBTQ+ allies are being especially targeted, it’s a reassuring pat on the back that we all have the freedom to be free.
