João Pedro Rodrigues | Morrer Como Um Homem (To Die Like a Man) / 2009

only i know who i am

by Douglas Messerli

 

João Pedro Rodrigues, Rui Catalão, and João Rui Guerra da Mata (screenplay), João Pedro Rodrigues (director) Morrer Como Um Homem (To Die Like a Man) / 2009

 

Transvestite and drag queen Tonia (Fernando Santos) is suddenly faced with a series of crises. His close fried Irene (Cindy Scrash) is encouraging Tonia to become fully transsexual, undergoing an operation to convert her penis into labia. But she is not at all sure that she wants to proceed with the operation, particularly given her religious convictions. Her young boyfriend Rosário (Alexander David) would certainly prefer she become a woman. However, even in the midst of her consideration, he goes missing, along with his TV set and several of her pieces of jewelry; he is a drug addict and has clearly gone on another bender, using the stolen items to raise enough cash for the drugs. She is forced to scour the streets once more to find him passed out on a side street of Lisbon and bring him back home in a condition that can only be described as hostile. Not only is he her lover, with whom she is still deeply in love, but she perceives him as a sort of son.

     Meanwhile, she is visited by her real-life son Zé Maria (Chandra Malatitch) who, serving in the military, has gone AWOL, fucking a fellow soldier in a forest before coming upon a strange house in which sit two other transvestite performers, Maria Bakker (Gonçalo Ferreira De Almeida) and her assistant/slave Paula (Miguel Loureiro), whose very existence triggers his own hostility to transvestite and transgender individuals* along with his own confusions about his sexual identity, resulting in him shooting and killing the boy he has just fucked. Zé Maria wants his father to hide him, but her mixed attentions to her still drugged lover and her dog Angelina so enrage him, that he runs, to reappear for brief instances as Tonia makes her way through the space of the film, reminding her of her own failures as both father and mother.

    At the Lisbon club where she sings fado songs and still reigns as queen, having helped establish interest in drag performances 30-years earlier, she is gradually being replace by younger artists such as the black performer Jenny (Jenny Larrue) who, even when Tonia pulls off her wigs in anger during performances, has her own long black hair to attract her audiences, including when he is sober, Rosário.

    Add to this chaos the fact that Tonia is beginning to realize that her silicon-injected breasts have become infected, white liquid and blood leaking from her aureole, and you can only imagine that God has sent down a series of impossible tests of faith upon her in the manner of Job.

    Portuguese director João Pedro Rodrigues might, in fact, have wondered whether the same curse had been cast upon him when, after two brilliant cinematic predecessors, O Fantasma (2000) and Two Drifters (2005)—both of which I’ve reviewed in My Queer Cinema volumes—American film commentators responded to the US 2011 opening of this film with reviews that were seemingly dumb to non-realistic approaches to film and, at the worst, outright hostile to transsexual and transgender behaviors, bordering at moments at what might be described as homophobic.

     Evidently Armond White thought he was saving gay culture by dismissing what he perceived as a bizarre and grotesque view of queer sexuality: “Indulging Rodriguez's ugliness limits the image of gay life and gay culture to negativity and grotesquerie.” Other than misspelling the director’s name, he apparently did not comprehend that many, if not most, transsexual individuals and even fewer transgender beings are even gay. Certainly Tonia, despite having a penis, does not think of herself as a man having sex with another man, but as a woman living in a basically heterosexual relationship. And, in any event, their form of sexual activity has little to do with gay men or lesbians except that their protections are argued for under the same rainbow flag in some quarters.

      That after works such as Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s In a Year of 13 Moons (1978), Neil Jordan’s The Crying Game (1992), and Stephen Elliott’s The Adventures of Priscilla Queen of the Desert (1994), along with numerous films by Pedro Almodóvar that he remained so utterly confused about that issue, troubles me. If even the critics can’t guide audiences through such sexually complex issues, who might be able to?

      But even more abhorrent were the comments by Martin Tsai writing in Critic’s Notebook

     

“To Die Like a Man ultimately ends on a somber and evocative note, although Mr. Rodrigues hasn’t fully realized the dramatic potential of someone finally reconciling with his birth gender — and, by extension, himself. And Mr. Rodrigues really has no excuse at this point, when his protagonist figuratively and literally stops being a drag and reveals himself as more than just someone playing dress-up 24/7.”

 

      This review seems to conflate the director with his character and basically demean all transgender individuals, particularly those who have decided not to go through with an operation. Why wasn’t there an outcry for such an ignorant and intolerant response, I can’t imagine. Certainly, gays and lesbians might have brought down his site with protestations. Yet it shows what transgender and transsexual individuals still must face in the press, not to speak of their everyday lives.

     Just as galling for Rodrigues, moreover, must have been the endless comparisons of To Die Like a Man with Fassbinder’s In a Year of 13 Moons and work by Almodóvar, in most cases praising Fassbinder while demeaning the newer work. Even the normally intelligent commentor Ed Gonzalez, writing in Slant took this easy snipe at Rodrigues’ work instead of pursing the vast differences between the two.

 

“Pity…that the Portuguese director should make his premiere at the New York Film Festival big table with what amounts to a sluggish interpretation of Fassbinder’s masterpiece In a Year of 13 Moons.”

 

    Not only do I not see To Die Like a Man as being sluggish, but it actually has very little in common with Fassbinder’s justifiably described masterwork. In 13 Moons the central figure Elvin / Elvira has had a transsexual operation in order to attract the German capitalist Anton Saitz, and the film basically toggles back and forth between Elvin / Elvira’s past and his search for that fulfillment of his sexual dream. Although Fassbinder uses camp parody at times to express the absurdity of Anton’s world and by extension Elvira’s, his is basically a realist narrative that traces Elvira’s obsession from its roots to his death.

     To Die Like a Man also contains a realist narrative, but as Gonzalez himself observes, the director is far more of a formalist than either of the other two directors, and he is interested in taking far greater cinematic risks by plopping down in the middle of seemingly realist scenes, tableaux that portray emblematically the issues occurring on the realist level. The voyage that Tonia takes with her lover Rosário is a self-aware journey into death without the theatrics of Fassbinder’s character, but with the assured high-heeled footprints of someone who has made over and determined her own life not for someone else’s approval but for her own survival. To Die Like a Man is a film of pulling together the long life-lines tossed out through her past in order to make meaning of her life and bring it to closure.

     Perhaps the best and only comparisons one need make, as one commentator suggested, is that like Fassbinder and Almodóvar, Rodrigues deals with transgender figures as real individuals whose lives are simply gesticulated in large gestures but must be daily attended to, just as Tonia cares for her garden and dogs, Antonia and Bum. And, indeed, even those daily gestures, the flowers and dogs play major roles in drawing together the various remnants of her life.

      In demonstrating how this film functions, I will briefly discuss 5 tableaux vivants, or living pictures, relating the scenes to the overall significance of this movie. Nearly all of these involve music.

      The first scene is a long and—since it appears entirely out context, being the first scene before we have met any of the film’s characters—a disorienting scene.

       Soldiers can be vaguely glimpsed on a night raid, presumably on a training mission. They walk in their camouflaged costumes, their faces covered with dark red, green, and black makeup hiding their faces, with machine guns and backpacks, moving slowly and quietly to advert attention. They too, as the first couple of the frames of the movie make clear, are dressed in “drag.”

      Three names are whispered out, Zé Maria, Mendes, and Cardoso, who are told to go on reconnaissance. They remove their backpacks and move forward, one of them getting lost almost immediately as Zé Maria goes in search of him. Evidently, Zé Maria and Cardoso have prearranged the event, for as they reconnoiter they move slowly toward each other and begin kissing, gradually pulling down their pants, with Zé Maria fucking the other in the dark forest.

        Soon after, they come to a child’s swing in the middle of the forest. Nearby, in a well-lit home in a woman is singing, accompanied by a piano player. For a moment, one of the soldiers appears about to shoot the inhabitants before the other pushes his gun away, making enough sound that the singer, Maria Bakker, steps outside to check, wondering how it could be wolves who long ago disappeared, and concluding that it must have been the wind.

        From the sound of her voice, the other soldier suddenly perceives that these are men in female attire, and wonders of Zé Maria whether these characters might be friends of his father, at which point, Zé Maria points his gun at Cardoso, reporting “My father is dead,” as he shoots and kills his former sexual partner.

       Soon, of course, this odd tableau, wherein everything has been played in out in slow-motion, will make perfect sense, even while it has seemed absolutely perverse upon first viewing. The mention of his father, who we soon discover is the drag queen Tonia, is what sets Zé Maria off. Obviously, he has confessed to his friend about his father’s predilections and his friend having used that knowledge against him, as it were, along with what are clearly the young man’s own indeterminate sexual feelings, has set him off. We might almost describe this as a prelude to the “opera,” a piece that sets the tone of the rest of the film and, without our even knowing it, defines the passions of some of its characters. Later Tonia and Rosário will stumble across this same forest swing, discover the house and its occupants, and even observe the gravesite of that pointlessly killed young man, who Bakker later reports has simply fallen from the sky. And they too will encounter a surreal-like experience.

      In that late film encounter, after the German drag artiste—who like Tonia has made herself over to establish her own female identity at perhaps a far grander, cabaret level, she citing the great German language poet Paul Celan—defines her own self and describes her personal escape from the past into quietude and virtual isolation; she takes her visitors, her servant-friend Paula (who plays a role very similar to the assistant of the lesbian Petra van Kant, Marlene in Fassbinder’s film The Bitter Tears of Petra van Kant) and her regular visitor Dr. Felgueiras on what she hints is a child’s game of play, a snipe hunt.

     For those of you who never attended, as a child, a summer camp, snipe hunting is generally what older students invited their younger neophytes to participate in—the search for a non-existent beast which usually left the uninitiated behind in the dark and confusion. Often it involved a trip into the woods and a trick or two, generally leaving the young believer behind to wander home through the dark alone and terrified.

     Nothing much happens on this snipe hunt until a larger-than-life white moon suddenly is covered over by a red cloud which turns the landscape a rosy-red color, as each member of the group sits down to listen to an invisible musical performer singing Baby Dee’s “Cavalry.” The director’s camera makes a 360-degree slow spin throughout the performance, carefully attending to each of the celebrants of this magical moment.

     Many have described it as a surreal moment, and it is only if you think of musical theater as being a kind of dream theater; for the devices that Rodrigues uses here, the voices coming out of nowhere, the colored lights and the camera’s observation of the audience in rapt wonderment are simply those used in the hundreds of cinema movies played on the screen, a genre which also moves randomly in and out of a basically realist context.

     The song’s lyrics are also quite apt, since they sing of Christ’s death, Tonia in this film being a kind of tortured Christ, a figure of love tormented by the world around her; moreover, the song deals with children and their missing daddy’s and momma’s, the children who ought to be home in bed, singing the lament. Here are the first three stanzas:

             

One night as I lay sleeping,

I heard children singing a song.

When I woke up, I was weeping.

And I knew that something was wrong.

Who are all of those children anyway?

And what do they want with me?

What's that song they're singing?

Something about Calvary.

 

Calvary!

Up on Calvary!

Calvary!

Up on Calvary!

 

Jesus said, "Don't weep for me.

No, don't weep for me.

Weep for your children instead.

Who are all of those children anyway?

Oughta be home in bed."

 

[repeat chorus]

 

What happened to your mama?

Where has your daddy gone?

What happened to your big sister?

Why are you singing that dreadful song?

 

[repeat chorus]

 

    It is Tonia’s own children, Rosário and Zé Maria, perhaps even the black girl Jenny (who strangely seems to be depicted in a painting in Bakker’s home), who are singing of Calgary; and hearing that song, Tonia later becomes frightened, demanding they leave in the middle of the night. Yet later she recognizes it as a comforting expression of the death she faces at the end of the film.

     The earlier two tableau represent both of Tonio’s boys, her lover/son and her lost son. Immediately after she finds Rosário on the street drugged out of his mind, she attempts to walk him back to the car, but on the way he wants to stop at what appears to be the opening of a cemetery, both of them facing into the grounds while Rosário almost mumbles out the song in the Fado tradition, “Erva danisha alastrar” (“Spreading Weed”) by Jaime Ribeiro and António Variações. In this work, the individual alone knows what and who really is, but isn’t sure that he truly wants to take on that identity, an identity private against public interpretation. Below are the first three stanzas in English:

 

Only I know...

 

Only I know that I am earth,

Rough earth waiting to be plowed;

Wild, unproductive mountains,

A mulberry, an untouched fruit.

 

Only I know that I am a stone;

I'm a stone that's hard to shape.

I'm a stone thrown through a hoop,

An unpolished gem that cannot be inlaid.

 

The interpretation is what they want to give:

I don't have a talent for haggling!

I also don't know if I want to improve it,

Because I don't know...

 

    It is a song sung, of course, for Tonia, about her private identity as a woman that she has almost come to fulfill, but is not sure if she wants to complete the process. And notably, her lover/son sings it her while she faces, unbeknownst to him, her own death; on her birthday nonetheless. Like the later scene in the woods, it is both terrifying and consoling, the only way that Rosário has to possibly make it up to her for his impossible behavior, albeit only temporary since he will punish and torture her again and again throughout the movie. In this particular scene, however, we come to comprehend why she loves him, that in his very worst moment, he still takes time out to sing of her (and his) dilemma. She too wants to make over him, an impossibility given his several addictions, not only to drugs, but to transsexual women and violence. Only late in the movie does he reassert his love for Tonia, while she lies in a hospital bed, Rosário with a small cloth, wiping and cleaning Tonia’s full body, including her penis, the last remnant of her former male identity.

     The fourth of what I have described as tableaux, is an aquarium where the on-the-run Zé Maria deposits three items: a finished chicken bone he is stolen out of his father’s refrigerator, a photograph of Tonia as a man walking with Zé Maria as a young boy, and one of her high heels. The first represents the remnants of his survival in the now, as he soon after again abandons the possibility of hiding out at his father’s house. The second is a remnant of his past relationship with his father, one now impossible to return to; and the third is a symbol of the reason why they can no longer be father and son, his father’s show as, in his mind, a “female impersonator.”

    He places these objects, notably, in a place where his father has created for yet others of the “animals” he protects, these the least important. Throughout the film, and particularly in the scene when he returns to Tonia’s house, we fear for the survival of Augustina, her pet dog. And later we fear that Rosário might also attempt to destroy her dogs, both of these boys feeling that she attends more to them than themselves, and resenting that fact.

     Indeed, when Rosário returns home to find Tonia’s son in the house and discovers what Zé Maria has deposited in the aquarium, he breaks its walls, the water spilling out onto the table and floor and the fish with it, left to die. The symbol his “brother” left beyond must be obliterated so that only he can retain Tonia’s attention.

      These tableaux represent the broader detail of more ordinary narrative events that transpire as Tonia, finally realizing she no longer keep her infection under cover, moves toward hospitalization and death. Just before she falls ill, after she has returned from the trip in the country, we see her back to her ordinary gardening, as she attempts to plant the forget-me-nots she has found on that voyage. Instead of soil, her hoe hits another object, a gold rosary she had previously thought Rosário had stolen from her for drug money. She calls him out to apologize and finds also his missing knife. It’s clear that the dog Angelina has been finding and burying objects.

     As they dig together they uncover a large photograph of Zé Maria that had also long gone missing. A moment later, bum brings in a piece of her wig extension that she has accused her dear friend Irene of having stolen, refusing to speak to her ever since.

     In the hospital she reconnoiters with her former enemies, Irene and Jenny, who again become friends. She even meets up in a brief hallucination with her son Zé Maria, begging him to buy her a man’s suit so that she can be properly buried in a Catholic ceremony as she was born, a man. She has lived her life as woman, at peace, accordingly, to return to God has he had made her.

     I have already mentioned the gentle bath, a loving scenario of human touch, provided by her lover. And he further represents his love and dependance upon her by going a swim in the ocean. Upon returning to the beach naked, he sits down on a towel with both dogs at his side and efficiently fills a large drug syringe, wrapping up a vein and injecting himself with a dosage, we soon discover, that settles him back flat upon the blanket dead. And commentors at the double funeral for Tonia and Rosário observe, he knew that he could survive without her.

     The final tableau is a summary and a holographic-like, bigger than life representation, again in the style of a musical comedy, of Tonia at the height of her career. She stands tall upon a tower of burial crypts lip-syncing one of her favorites, “Imenso” (“Immense”) by José Cid and Paulo Bragança:

 

And, and that's how it goes

Faces I do not remember, which pass

And the room is already dark

It looks like my big sea and I will sing

Here, and all around I already feel the silence

The music slowly from the violins

And I see you again

You, to know where you are

In this great sea, yes you

Who maybe I will never see again

A face which passes and goes

You will leave this theater in the dark

 

Immense in this great

Sea there is the immense

I feel you in this theater in the dark

I feel you're there, you're here near me

I feel you in this theater in the dark

I feel you're here

 

     Below are the open bodies of Tonia and Rosário, there for the mourners to stroke and touch before being placed in the nearby coffins and buried. Maria Bakker, Irene, Jenny, and Tonia’s former club manager Teixeira are all there, nearly everyone to celebrate the being who lived her life as a woman, only to die as a man.

     Despite the statements of several critics, there is no sensationalism here, no large showy gestures, not even as the towering performer she once was. Perhaps Mattie Lucas, in Front Row, best summarized my feelings about this film:

 

“To Die Like a Man is, in some ways, the best Almodovar film Pedro Almodovar never made. There is a glossy, camp element present of course. We are dealing with drag queens after all, but it's also disarmingly sincere. Tonia exists in a world of artifice, of distance between persona and identity. For most of her life she has been a larger than life projection of someone else, and it isn't until she actually starts to become someone else that she discovers who she truly is. Make no mistake, this is not a film about judging transsexuals, or somehow suggesting that transsexuality is to deny one's true self. Quite the opposite, actually. At its heart it's a celebration of humanity, a probing exploration of self-identity and image, of personal desires versus expectations.”

 

*Although I have written about it previously in a couple of volumes, it is apparent that I must do so once again. Male individuals who dress up as women, often describing it as a compulsion they cannot escape, are, generally speaking, described as transsexuals or transvestites. This includes a large number of heterosexual men who are married to women and have children. A cinematic example is Ed Wood in Tim Burton’s film of 1994 bearing the real schlock director’s name.

     Many transsexuals dress up in female clothing simply for the pleasure, sharing their experience with close friends or at celebratory events and parties. Other transsexuals, some of them describing themselves as female impersonators, do it for a living such as the Australian performer Dame Edna Everage (Barry Humphries). In the late 19^th and early 20th centuries female impersonators such as John Bunny, Julian Eltinge, Curt Bois, Frederick Kovert, Bothwell Browne, and others, some gay and some heterosexual, were extremely popular with both heterosexual and gay audiences. Other cinematic straight men like Roscoe Arbuckle, Charles Chaplin, Stan Laurel, Wallace Beery, Buster Keaton, and Harold Lloyd regularly performed in drag in films, a tradition that continued in later generations with individuals such as Milton Berle and Tyler Perry, among many others.

     A great many crossdressers or transvestites also perform as drag queens, again some of them being heterosexual while others are openly gay.

      A number of drag queens, as in Rodrigues’ movie also might be described, depending upon their own feelings and self-definition, as transgender, as individuals who do not simply feel the urge to dress up in women’s clothing but actually feel they were born into the wrong gender, that they are truly females defined at birth as males (or born as females who feel they are male). Some of these transgender individuals contain mixed sexual organs or are simply hormonally aligned closer to being to the opposite sex. A far larger number of these transgender individuals, born as “normal” males (or females), choose to have operations as well as hormonal treatments to transition into the opposite sex from which they were born, while many more may opt for hormonal treatment and, if male, breast augmentation, but determine not to have an operation. Each individual is different, as are his or her attractions to others.

      Many transgender individuals, perceiving themselves as women involve themselves in relationships with men that they define as a heterosexual relationship, which is apparently what the hero Tonia of Rodrigues’ film does. Others seek out gay men and still others seek out relationships with heterosexual women, with lesbians, or even other transsexuals. The choices are as open for transgender individuals as they are for anyone else, gay, lesbian, or heterosexual.

     In short, being a drag queen does not necessarily have anything to do with either being gay or transgender. Indeed, there are many female “drag” performers who dress and behave as males, and even some females such as Mae West (and arguably Dolly Parton, who admits to it), who perform as their own sex in such an exaggerated manner that it has been defined by some, including myself, as a drag performance. I argue, in fact, that drag is nearly as popular with heterosexuals as it is with gay men and lesbians. And often drag performances are heterosexually oriented and defined by that audience as much as they are by gay men.

      None of these “queer” behaviors, moreover, can be said to define or delimit any other sexual orientation. Gay men are not generally drag queens, drag queens are not generally transgender, and transgender individuals are not necessarily gay or lesbian. The time has come for us to recognize these differences and openly acknowledge that when it comes to sexual behavior and desire that we are not dealing with two or three possibilities but a multitude of individuals, each with their own particular sexual and gender definitions.

 

Los Angeles, June 29, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2023).