The queen is dead
The first scene is disconcerting, but somehow First unmount all the machinery that drives die like a man. First, we see the expressionless face of a permanent character being camouflaged by a mechanical hand and dismissive. Then, we see that young man crawling through a thick forest with a fellow soldier, pushing through the night. We do not understand if they are in a war, if it is only a simulacrum, or what historical moment the film is based, but soon we find that the two young soldiers find a quiet corner and covered and shipped in a sexual act hastily. The camera, true to the style that characterizes it, remains in a suspended state, focusing on parts, cutting the bodies or the environment in detail. Once the young end, cut through the clearing and encounter a strange, bright house in which there are two transvestites composing a theme on the piano. The view from afar, from the other side of the window, completely mesmerized. Suddenly, one of the voyeurs you tells the other that those should be friends of his father and in a thoughtless fit of anger the other says "my father is dead" and shoots him, nothing more.
The next scene, we start from what looks like a jungle, but ends up being a greenhouse, according to this system of linkages with starting the film, a constant game of scale, with households package that appears in the middle of a battlefield, with songs sung in lip sync with total feeling (the scene of the black drag queen singing "Total eclipse of the heart" like the Bonnie Tyler herself, until it cuts the music and hear his real voice dissonant) with death and sex sniffing each other's tails.
Joao Pedro Rodrigues Tonia carries the story of a transvestite willing to change their sex to satisfy Rosario, designer boyfriend with serious drug problems who establishes a relationship of love and patronage always on the verge of dissolution. Lisbon, away from the classic images of the beautiful port, is a twilight world, cold, empty moments. Turning to the scales, we only see, there is only Tonia world: fellow clubhouse (between drags and sadomasochistic model sheathed in latex), hairdressers transvestites, or his own son (who at the time is revealed as the soldier who started the film). The rest of the world, as taxi drivers or bystanders, not shown, or more precisely, does not exist.
Lisbon twilight This speaks of the vital status of the protagonist himself, who not only is a bit old and outdated in the theater where he built himself, but one of her silicone implants had initiated an infection that his body is taking . The plot of the last days of a transvestite does not seem exactly the most encouraging of the plots, but the movie was filmed, not tragicomic key (as said by all sides), but for an idea about life and death inherent kitsch and melodrama opens and transforms in many ways, such as that paper penis vulva become a sublime demonstration of origami that makes a doctor at the beginning of the film. What we see is not tragedy or comedy, it's life, but not "life itself", for which we could think of a realistic format, but life shot from his passions, from its high peaks and lows, drama and happiness burning skin, something beyond the same director and that puts his work in the line of characters like Fassbinder or Pedro Lemebel, rather than with Almodovar, who could not yield to the temptation to show Tonia shine on stage candles up his stage presence, while not afraid to Portuguese pulse and left out of the spotlight, only show after racks, or in taxis alone. Rodrigues, as Fassbinder is merciless, with both joy and with sadness.
Another clear example of this notion of reality and unreality occurs at almost half the movie, where Tonia and Rosario, taking a diversion through the woods to the house are insulated from Maria Bekker (which is apparently a well-known television personality in Portugal), almost full circle, which are immediately welcome. Everything that happens there, from the tomb of the unknown soldier, to the hunting scene of fireflies (with a bucolic frolic boundary between 's Dream A Midsummer Night , Shakespeare and Food on the grass - Jean Renoir, 1959), or the sequence shot of Baby Dee song red filter is surrounded by a magical aura, so different everything that was happening, which may well not have occurred, or at least have happened in a corner of the soul of Tonia, as a quiet requiem before his death.
All this is powered by a superb art direction, with a camera that has the same love fetish objects declared to the same characters or, as it were, the whole queer cosmogony. As all that Tonia buried for his dog in the garden, whether a Swede, a toy machine gun, a zipper, a bouquet of forget-me, a gold rosary, an extension of a wig, is much more than an accessory, is a covenant, a way to find the tragedy in the trivial and the banal in the tragedy, to save themselves in the glare of the object, a surf board to drift down the river Acheron without wetting stilettos.
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