*/****
starring Gael García Bernal, Roberta Colindrez, Perla de la Rosa, Raúl Castillo
written by David Teague & Roger Ross Williams
directed by Roger Ross Williams
by Walter Chaw Playing out as an exhausted vanity piece on the one side and an exhausted sports biopic on the other, Roger Ross Williams’s Cassandro essays the life and early career of flamboyant, El Paso-based luchador Saúl Armendaríz, who, under his nom de guerre “Cassandro,” became the first openly gay exóticos character in Mexican wrestling allowed to actually win matches. Armed with the “Mexico tint” coined by Steven Soderbergh in Traffic, a lot of Dutch angles, and an inexplicable 1.44:1 aspect ratio that makes everything seem like it was shot on an iPhone, Williams nudges the film along from one stale trope to the next like an old frog disinterestedly leaping across lilypads. There are flashbacks to Saúl’s childhood in which his “really into Jesus” dad, Eduardo (Robert Salas), feeds him doughnuts, not knowing his son will one day be an emblem of the love that dare not speak its name; interludes with Saúl’s figure-hugging-animal-print-dress-wearing mama Yocasta (Perla de la Rosa) that show her son to be a good boy; and then montages where Saúl trains with badass Sabrina (Roberta Colindrez) and starts climbing the Lucha Libre ranks. Cassandro, in other words, has nothing to say and doesn’t say it with any particular innovation, either. What a shame.
What Cassandro does do pretty well is act like an unintentional horror movie, a Boys Don’t Cry or Prick Up Your Ears set against the backwater Mexican wrestling circuit. Oh, the number of times I was certain Saúl was about to be butchered by his emasculated/humiliated peers, his emasculated/humiliated/closeted and bearded boyfriend Gerardo (Raúl Castillo), his obviously criminal fight promoter, or the enraged mobs assembled for the bouts to rapturously chant epithets and wish for his mutilation. Maybe he’ll be killed during one of his anonymous pick-ups. Maybe he’ll be killed because he snorts the wrong white powder off the wrong fist. Maybe he kills himself in his dramatic leap off the balcony during the Big Match. (You can’t tell, but I typed that extra emphatically.) I think there’s some method to the madness of showing a dude entirely pleased to poke bears, maybe even some ennoblement in his actualization–but I don’t know, it all just seems accidental to the point of incompetent. There’s a specific scene where Yocasta reluctantly applauds one of her son’s triumphs that has ADR so jarring I did wonder whether we were seeing the film unfinished.
Cassandro isn’t a disaster–it’s a very safe telling of a very unsafe story. It’s a rigid and stultifying portrayal of a fluid, electrifying presence and a mechanical reproduction of an art form that relies on the improvisational athleticism of performers who ruin their bodies to supply the right amount of bread and circus to people who need the animal release. There’s meat on this bone; I suspect the topic is even vital. I wish Cassandro had been made by someone like John Waters, who might appreciate the camp, or even Alejandro González Iñárritu, who would at least try to capture some of the iconography of a gripping cultural movement. Although Bernal is terrific, he’s slotted into the same three scenes in endless repetition–a stupefying squandering of resources the only upshot of which is that it almost distracts from how Bernal is a good 20 years too old to be playing this character at this point in his life. Anyway, The Wrestler is right there.
