To Die Like a Man
(Morrer como un homem)
Director in Person
Screening on Film
$12 Special Event Tickets
With Fernando Santos, Alexander David, Gonçalo Ferreira de Almeida.
Portugal, 2009, 35mm, color, 133 min.
Portuguese with English subtitles.
Rodrigues’ critically acclaimed new film opens with a cryptically paradigmatic scene superimposing two polar extremes of masculinity, with a platoon of soldiers on patrol stumbling upon an isolated house deep in a forest inhabited by two cross-dressing men. The unidentified gunshot that suddenly rings out triggers unnerving ellipsis that abruptly shifts the film to Lisbon and the life of a middle-aged transsexual who works as a cabaret performer. Carefully avoiding the tired clichés of the drag queen film, Rodrigues steers clear of the stage lights to instead focus on a life precariously balanced between the emotionally charged spaces of purported escape offered by the dressing room and the domestic realm, with a story of an aging transvestite who struggles to care for a wayward son and a self-destructive junkie boyfriend. A certain theatricality nevertheless exerts itself, animated by the film’s overbrimming soundtrack of popular songs that the characters sing to themselves and to each other in a radical, and occasionally Fassbinder-esque reinvention of the musical as an admixture of melodrama and tragedy.