To Die Like a Man

Toronto International Film Festival Program Guide
2009

Morrer como um homem | To Die Like a Man
Joao Pedro Rodrigues
PORTUGAL/FRANCE. 2009
Portugese
134 minutes Colour/35mm
Production Company: Rosa Filmes/Ad Vitam Productions
Producer: Maria Jodo Sigaiho
Screenplay: João Pedro Rodrigues, Rui Catalão
Cinematography: Rui Poças
Editor: João Pedro Rodrigues, Rui Mourão
Production Designer: João Rui Guerra da Mata
Sound: Nune Carvailho
Principal Cast: Fernando Santos, Alexander David, Gonçalo Ferreira de Almeida, Chandra Malatitch, Jenny Larrue
Production: Rosa Filmes

Tonia is a transsexual star of the Lisbon club world. She contends with a needy junkie boyfriend, competition from a new black drag sensation, her psychopathic soldier son and, worst of all, the physical and emotional ravages of age. Her body has come to reject the various surgical and hormonal transformations that made her famous, a fact brutally represented by the silicone literally seeping from an infected nipple. Her body seems to insist that her life lived as a woman must end in her dying like a man.

There is something oddly dangerous and transgressive about this idea. It questions thinking about the degree of personal control we have over our own bodies and the limits of choice around sexual identity in the face of mortality. Risky thinking like this is what makes João Pedro Rodrigues Portugal’s master of the cinematic demimonde. With the same clarity and refreshing lack of political tact, his first two features, Phantom and Odete, also boldly explore the longings and secret desires of characters at society’s margins. In this regard, he is a child of Fassbinder, goading us into a laugh at the expense of a sexual fetishist or drag queen before throwing her humanity in our face for our own ashamed examination. At the same time, his writing and especially his sense of humour leavens his intensity; often very funny, his films have a sense of the absurd and delight in dialogue unironically ripped from the spirit of Joan Crawford and Bette Davis.

Rodrigues is a filmmaker searching for new cinematic ideas to give his characters shape. A particularly astonishing sequence in To Die Like a Man occurs in a forest, when Tonia and her boyfriend try to escape the city but end up getting lost in the dragtopia villa of the great Maria Bakker (or so we are told) and her unfortunate silent companion, Paula. As they pause to wait for the appearance of the xnipes—imaginary creatures that will bring magic back into the world—the moon enters a phase of red eclipse, the characters pause, and for five minutes, we too enter the ethereal, sensual dream space of a soon-to-be-departed gender outlaw.
—Noah Cowan