NYFF - To Die Like a Man

One of my two or three most eagerly anticipated films in this year's New York Film Festival, Portuguese director João Pedro Rodrigues's To Die Like a Man, premieres tonight. I'll post my thoughts tomorrow but I wanted to put up some photos ahead of time. The top image (reportedly from the latter part of the film), set in a forest and bathed in that eerie red light, tells me that this will be a drag queen movie like no other I've ever seen.

UPDATE: To Die Like a Man far exceeded my expectations. It constantly surprises the viewer with a succession of beautiful scenes and images inspired, as Rodrigues said in his post-screening Q&A, by melodramas such as Minnelli's Home from the Hill (which I had coincidentally just seen the day before) and those of Sirk and Fassbinder, but also by war movies like Raoul Walsh's Objective, Burma! and by Busby Berkeley musicals. On top of these influences, there are traces of the films of Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Tsai Ming-Liang and Jacques Nolot. If this makes To Die Like a Man sound derivative, it is anything but.

In his third feature, Rodrigues has achieved a formal mastery hinted at in O Fantasma! and Odete. The film follows a sort of dream logic all its own, beginning with a closeup of a soldier in the woods applying camouflage makeup (the theme of drag artifice and illusion beginning in a hypermasculine context), but this leads to a scene of graphic sex between two of the soldiers, one of whom turns out to be the estranged son of Tonia, the hero(ine). Nothing is quite what it seems in this movie.

There are certainly similarities to Fassbinder's masterpiece, In a Year of 13 Moons, although Rodrigues shows much greater compassion and forgiveness for his troubled characters. The film alternates scenes of great pain and suffering with hilarious, campy interludes and moments of remarkable peace and serenity. Tonia's journey begins to take on religious overtones, sort of a Stations of the Cross in drag, as in the gorgeous red-tinged scene above where the characters sit still for close to 5 minutes as we, and they, listen to Baby Dee's haunting song, "Calvary."

The title lets us know the final tragic outcome of Tonia's story, but it's impossible to predict just where it will lead along the way, and hard to do justice to Rodrigues's masterful use of color (especially blues and reds), design, camera movement, music, and performances, above all Fernando Santos as Tonia. The last two long takes of the film are connected by a cell phone call from a resurrected Tonia to her dead boyfriend Rosario, as a lovely fado song accompanies the camera as it cranes from the cemetery to a tranquil view of Lisbon harbor. It's one of the film's many transcendent moments.

There's a fine interview of Rodrigues by Michael Guillén at The Evening Class (http://theeveningclass.blogspot.com/2009/09/tiff09-to-die-like-man-evening-class.html).