'Cassandro' Review: Wrestling with the Truth
(Image via Amazon Studios)
Cassandro directed by Roger Ross Williams is an oddly lopsided entry in the biopic genre. Available on Amazon Prime, and released to theaters just in time for Hispanic heritage month, it leaves you wishing that more attention had been paid to the wider context of the story Williams and his co-writer David Teague were attempting to tell. The film is very loosely based off the life of the real lucha libre wrestler Saúl Armendáriz who became a queer icon for fighting as an exótico at a time when such wrestlers were seen as novelty acts for audiences to vent their homophobia towards. Unlike the typical “macho” masked wrestlers, exóticos are unmasked and adopt a more feminine style of costume and performance. Though not all exóticos are gay, their wrestling personas are clearly meant to evoke gay stereotypes. The real Armendáriz described himself as a “drag-queen wrestler” in this excellent 2014 article from The New Yorker https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/09/01/man-without-mask
If you don’t know anything about lucha libre and its traditions, the movie does very little to orient you to what made Cassandro, the wrestling persona that Saúl invents, so different. The audience is dropped into his life as a struggling masked wrestler with little to help you understand where the action is taking place or even what decade it’s supposed to be. We eventually discover that the place is usually El Paso, but sometimes Ciudad Juárez, and the time must be the late 80s or early 90s. The time is largely conveyed through Saúl’s hideously distracting haircut which he sports throughout the entire film and appears to be a clumsy imitation of the real wrestler’s style.
(Image via Amazon Studios)
In fact, clumsy is a word you could use to describe a lot of what happens in Cassandro, which is a shame because Gael García Bernal’s performance as the titular wrestler is often wonderfully nuanced. Saúl is continually torn between dual realities- his mother who accepts him and his father who rejects him, his hidden affair with another wrestler and his growing desire to live openly as a gay man, and his desire to win versus the tradition that says exóticos never win wrestling matches. Perla de La Rosa plays Saúl’s mother Yocasta with great sympathy for her very human failings. She loves and supports her son with almost her whole being, but can’t let go of that small part of herself that unfairly blames him for driving away his fundamentalist father. Raúl Castillo plays Gerardo, Saúl’s married lover, who is unwilling to give up his socially sanctioned identity as a straight man even though his relationship with Saúl is clearly one of love and not just sex. These three strong performances contrast with weak efforts from almost all the other actors, who are admittedly stuck with a pretty clunky script. This includes the wrestling performances which look absurdly fake and sanitized compared to real lucha libre matches.
After Saúl’s introduction in the movie as a timid weakling, he begins performing as Cassandro the exótico and suddenly transforms into a magnetically charismatic athlete from his very first match. Cassandro drips with confidence and effortlessly woos the audience into cheering for him instead of hurling slurs. There is some interest in seeing how Saúl wrestles (haha!) with the instant success of this new strategy. Cassandro almost becomes a second person inhabiting Saúl’s body- one who is free from the bonds of social norms. This leads him down paths both good and bad. Cassandro isn’t afraid to indulge in illegal drugs or dangerous flirtations. On the other hand, Cassandro also isn’t afraid to be himself, something Saúl has been scrupulously avoiding in an attempt to win back his father and keep his mother’s dream alive that they will someday be reconciled as a family.
(Image via Amazon Studios)
The most disappointing aspect of Cassandro is how easily everything comes to Saúl in the ring and how divorced this version of his career is from reality. No other exóticos are shown interacting with Saúl/Cassandro even though the real wrestler had mentors that he trained with. An older openly gay exótico known as Babe Sharon first encouraged the real Saúl to transition to a more flamboyant style, and fellow exótico Pimpinela Escarlata was a formative early wrestling partner.
Movie Saúl appears to be a lone wanderer in the wilderness except for his trainer Sabrina who is so lightly sketched you don’t really understand her motivations. Cassandro’s impact on the wider world of lucha libre is almost entirely ignored except for one scene where Cassandro is making a TV appearance on a talk show. A young man sitting with his father in the audience tells him that he wasn’t afraid to come out to his family because of how Cassandro changed people’s perceptions of gay people. Cassandro/Saúl seems surprised at this revelation, as if it had never occurred to him that his personal quest would have any affect on others.
Finally, the writers made the odd choice to only cover the first few years of Cassandro’s career and frame Saúl’s eventual negative confrontation with his father as a win. Saúl rejects his father just as his father had rejected him. However, the real Saúl Armendáriz reconciled with his father later in his career. For gay audience members who may be hoping for their own reconciliations, you would think that this might be a better ending to offer- the idea that fighting back doesn’t always mean your opponent crawls away leaving you triumphant, but alone. Sometimes they join you as an ally, even if it might take longer than you would like. The real Saúl went on to win many more fights performing as Cassandro. With the help of others, he established a new tradition of exóticos who were equal competitors that could, and did, win matches. By making this version of Cassandro’s life such a small personal tale, the audience can’t help but feel that something important has been cut from the story of this larger-than-life hero.