Sentenced to live in a society that would not have him, where crime and oppression seemed his only options, social misfit João Francisco shrugged off the stigma of growing up poor, black, and homosexual in turn-of-the-century Rio de Janeiro by reinventing himself in the form of Madame Satã. Francisco staged his spectacular "coming out" at the Carnival of 1942, but Karim Aïnouz's debut feature focuses instead on the period of his life ten years earlier, when the future transvestite first tasted his freedom through the miracle of performance.
In this vibrant character study, newcomer Lázaro Ramos plays Francisco with an almost animal intensity, a reflection of the man's volatile and ambiguous spirit, where any given event seems equally likely to end in either a cathartic fit of laughter or a sudden burst of violence. Cheated out of his wages, Francisco lives in a squalid row house shared with two housemates — a transvestite and a prostitute — and gets by as a hustler and a thief, luring men to his room and then robbing them. Like so many revolutionary heroes before him, Francisco was branded a delinquent in his day, serving nearly a third of his 74 years in prison, but Madame Satã positions him as a South American Jean Genet, a social outcast who accepts his mantle as a criminal and defines himself accordingly.
No less incendiary despite the passage of time, Francisco's vices challenge even the limits of contemporary mores. For some, the film will seem outright pornographic, though Aïnouz clearly intends it as a celebration of life in the unlikeliest of places. His approach indulges the kind of impressionistic freedom that also characterized Before Night Falls and Piñero. But unlike Reinaldo Arenas and Miguel Piñero, Francisco is neither poet nor playwright, and an American audience's familiarity with his impact as a performance artist is likely to end where the movie leaves off. Here is a film that generously depicts Francisco's tortured existence as an earth-bound caterpillar, but regrettably omits his emergence as a butterfly.
Copyright © 2008 Hachette Filipacchi Media U.S., Inc.