Morrer como um homem

To die like a man. It's the title of João Pedro Rodrigues' new film. I saw it last Sunday at the Nova cinema in Brussels during this year's edition of Pinkscreens. It is a very beautiful film. It's not just the fact that I know so many of the people and the characters in it - the film is a slice of Lisbon at night as I knew it in the late 1980's and throughout the 1990's. As I told the director during the Q&A session that followed the screening, his film has lucidité sentimentale. People tend to think that those at the margins, like transvestites, live lives detached from reality, but I actually think that they live lives that are intensely real and that is why they dream so much, and hurt so much in the process.

There was someone behind me who said to someone beside him that all Portuguese are crazy, that we are cut off from the rest of Europe, that we have nothing in common. But the themes explored in this film, apart from being universal, are very European. It deals with the quest for identity in general and gender identity in particular, with tragic love in the best classical Greek tradition, with the role of women as the initiators of mankind into the world of dreams and mysteries. Le féminin sacré; sacré féminin!

I loved seeing Maria Bakker (alwyas double K!) in the film. MB became a character à part entière, bravo! I wonder where the German quotations came from. Was it Schiele? Gonçalo Ferreira de Almeida, the actor playing MB, was for many years the flatmate of my former lover, Zé Manuel. I met him many times in their flat surrounded by a haze of creative cannabis. MB is his creation and a powerful one. In the film, it made an interesting contrast to the character of Tonia, who, although apparently free to be what she wants to be, is in reality constrained by many mental strings. MB is free in her essence, not bothering to question herself about whether she is a real woman. No one is a real woman, not even biological women, in the sense that femininity is construed, invented, and is as much the product of its creator as it is in the eye of the beholder. MB does not need a sex-change, because she incarnates her imagined woman.

There are many poetic moments in the film, but there were two high such moments for me. The gambuzinos' hunt in the forest and the tableau vivant of Tonia, her boyfriend, MB, Paulinha and the doctor, resting on a tree trunk surrounded by the red of the night and listening to that song that came from everywhere and nowhere. Was it Antony, from Antony and the Johnsons? Maybe not, but it was close. I think there should be a film about MB, she is ripe for it. I hope she'll invite me to come and sing a song. Ah, me and MB, it would be a riot!

Then there is the last scene, with Tonia singing at her funeral, with Lisbon in the back, the buildings, the cars, and the red-dusk bridge over the river Tejo, with its two arches like the breasts Tonia had to give away.

The film was so sad it felt like singing all the time. And indeed it reads also as a musical, with the songs of António Variações and Marco Paulo providing most of the soundtrack; songs that the characters sing themselves on the road to their destiny. I also go through life singing. There is nothing more natural than that.

MB's relation with Paulinha, her maid, her assistant, her pianist, her lover?, made me think of Fassbinder's Petra Von Kant. It had the same qualities of dominance and submission, dependence and betrayal. After all, where would MB be without Paulinha? And what would Paulinha do if MB started to treat her right? The director said he studied Fassbinder and that there where elements of the German director's cinematography in his own films, but the Petra Von Kant thing had not been intentional, it was just me adding another layer of interpretation to the film. Yep, that's what viewers do too!