French ticklers and flexible gender roles.
Middle-aged Alain vacillates between his social options in ways that suggest a very modern dissatisfaction and rootlessness; his confusion resembles what movies typically romanticize in younger people. Balding but boyish Greggory has acquired the temperamental complexity (maturity) to make Alain's indecision-his flightiness-a sign of being conflicted more than confused. He lives out the sexual license that earlier generations of gay men and rebellious women struggled to achieve and that current generations may take for granted. This means his trendy behavior carries a sense of history even while it represents the boldest kind of contemporary liberty.
Greggory's tall, lanky gait, together with his wide, pleading eyes, denotes a certain submissiveness, yet Alain is constantly abrasive-impatient with his job, querulous with his boss and law partner Laurence (Nathalie Richard) and inconstant with a steady flow of male and female sex partners, including the new client Marc (Vincent Martinez), a sexually ambivalent youth whose murder conviction is on appeal. It seems writer-director Ilan Duran Cohen is making an appeal for Alain's indecisiveness and outlawry. As critic John Demetry suggested, the film's improbable plot holds together only according to the rules of French farce-although it is played straight-facedly. A man like Alain reveals the compulsion and weakness of men living by their smaller heads and of women who also participate in such moral prerogative. But instead of taking Hollywood's puritanical approach by showing the dread price Alain pays for his lifestyle, Cohen simply stays observant, constantly fascinated.
In a recent essay on "predatory queers," the normally perspicacious Richard Goldstein based his own observation of contemporary gay audacity on the dubious characterizations in recent works like the Broadway play Take Me Out. But that drama offers none of the special existential drama that Greggory radiates. Even when behaving repellently, Alain reveals ardent desperation. He is open to every person he flirts with or beds down. It is almost cosmically farcical how often he seems to find soulmates-whether in Christophe (Cyrille Thouvenin), the puppyish younger brother of a female lover, or Babette (Julie Gayet), the hardened girlfriend of his client, who cannot define her own allegiance. Each of these coolly acted but poignant encounters provides a mirror for Alain's personal quandary, as well as a panoply of the modern world's disarray. All this makes Alain something more than a predator; his constant search for an ideal is also a quest for peace within himself.
Confusion of Gender (terrible title, unless the French La Confusion des Genres refers to breaking down and reorganizing romantic-comedy conventions) would feel immoral without the very humane grounding that Greggory provides. He brings with him the moral colloquies and ethical lessons learned from his memorable participation in Eric Rohmer's Pauline at the Beach and Patrice Chereau's Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train. Focusing on Alain's sexual availability, Greggory reveals it as a powerful distraction from the weariness of examining his own motivations. (This is what makes the screwball absurdity of his life not laughable: In a jail-house menage with Marc and Babette, Alain is caught in the middle of their wrangling like a third partner in an hysterical tango.)
There's confounding integrity to Greggory's characterization; he never pleads for audience approval. (Frequently naked, he seems unselfconsciously so.) Sometimes admittedly gay, sometimes not. Not Jewish, not Roman Catholic, Alain recalls the line in Morrissey's great song "Nobody Loves Us" in which the singer identifies himself as one of the "'Born-again' atheists/Practicing trouble-makers." Alain has no agenda, just panic about life in the face of death-which is made more touchingly credible when Alain and Laurence become parents and newly confront what "life" means.
A role as unconventional and uniquely expressive as Alain must depend upon an actor's candor. Outside of Alan Cumming's recent Hollywood employment, I can't think of another contemporary actor willing to make sexual identification as openly as Greggory. We're accustomed to actors capitalizing on heterosexual norms, usually by rubber-stamping patriarchy through the cliches of masculine prowess. Greggory exposes those prevarications the way Gary Cooper used to, as Montgomery Clift did in his best roles, as Brando did in Reflections in a Golden Eye-and he does it with even more vigor than the pioneering Dirk Bogarde. Alternately delicate and crude, vain and abashed, Greggory's Alain assumes top and bottom positions with a naturalness that overturns generations of masculine movie-star tradition. William Hurt's portrayal of an effeminate drag queen in Kiss of the Spider Woman won an Oscar for clearly demonstrating he was not what he was pretending to be. Alain's smile at the prospect of a new acquaintance-a new choice-is a sign that he is, deep down, like all of us. There aren't enough Oscars to affirm Pascal Greggory's boldness.
Madame Sata, a biography of Brazil's legendary six-foot drag queen, pimp and murderer Joao Francisco dos Santos gives its lead actor, Lazaro Ramos, as much of a showcase as Confusion of Genders gives Greggory. Ramos goes to the outer edge of flamboyance-dangerous, self-destructive and self-immortalizing. (After serving time for a murder, dos Santos ruled Carnival for more than 30 years. He died in 1976 at age 76.) First seen bruised and propped against a police-station wall for his mug shot, dos Santos is described as an outlaw: "He hates society which rejects him because of his vices." Director Karim Ainouz doesn't explain away those vices but flaunts them as signs of dos Santos' brave individuality, part of his struggle against Brazil's racial, sexual and economic oppression.
Scene by scene, it is difficult to know what to make of dos Santos, a man who embodies many of the same social standards he defies. He's a con artist, a sexual exploiter, a thief, even something of a bigot in the attraction he's internalized for a white, mustachioed guttersnipe. "Angel, please fly away. Leave this depraved and stinking world," the dark-skinned queen begs of his white trick. Madame Sata gazes in awe at dos Santos' contradictions; looking at them so intensely makes this movie (more so than City of God) the best recent examination of that country's sexual and racial paradoxes.
At a government conference in Rio that I attended last year, it was revealed that of the country's famous multiracial population, 45 percent of the blacks and 55 percent of the whites considered themselves "white." Madame Sata exposes the depth of such confusion in the figure of dos Santos, who, for the majority of his adult life, took on a drag persona based equally on Josephine Baker and Kay Johnson, the latter star of Cecil B. DeMille's 1930 movie Madam Satan. When flirtatious Renatinho (Felippe Marques) keeps coming 'round, Dos Santos pathetically questions the attraction: "What do you see in me that I don't see-Valentino? Weissmuller? Gary Cooper?"
Presenting such a human conundrum in high-contrasty photography and cubistic edits, Ainouz forces extreme responses of sympathy and repulsion. This garish biography is genuinely ambivalent-Raging Bull in drag. But Ainouz points toward a sociological explanation. He subverts Brazil's famous festive chaos by twisting it into psychosis. Dos Santos' stage performance is second to the visual anarchy Ainouz shows us-to feel the madness rather than simply enjoy the exhibition. And Ramos' performance is striking. Calling himself "The Divine Negress," he's a proud human grotesque-whether in a necklace of beads covering muscle and sweat or in a rakishly tilted fedora that makes him resemble Mos Def. Ramos makes dos Santos a brand new archetype brought disturbingly close.