Cassandro, the Exotico!

The exclamation mark has surely gone astray — what is it doing here? It would make a fitting flourish for the title of another film: the gripping, Hollywood-style biopic Cassandro (2023, with Gael García Bernal in the leading role). Applied to the documentary by the Frenchwoman Marie Losier, the punctuation seems misplaced. The subject is the same — this improbable icon of lucha libre, yet Losier does not work by the light of his mannerisms. Taking as her raw material a flamboyant and (there it is) exclamatory man, the result leaves one scratching one’s head: an unhurried visual essay, shot on 16mm with variable focus, drifting alongside the chronology until it tires of it.

It is an evanescent film, of hazy shots, which seems a contradiction. We can look at it another way: a tender documentary, attuned to the moment at which we meet Cassandro; the portrait of a man awakening to his own mortality, in the hangover of a fleeting glory. An ellipsis would sit better than the exclamation mark but — spelling aside — the truth is that Losier always tells us plainly what she is about. Coming from the fine arts and from literature rather than from film school, she has built up an unashamedly niche filmography — around figures who, after all, are actually tangent to the plane of the mainstream, transgressive in their art and juicy when it comes to their intimate memoirs. The Frenchwoman is doubly evasive: she neither picks over the works nor vampirises the lives she portrays, though she had ample scope to do so. To wit: the P-Orridge couple (a love consummated in a project of surgery and bodily modification) lent itself to lip-licking sensationalism, yet there is no trace of that in The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye.

The director — responsible for Peaches Goes Bananas (2024), about the Canadian iconoclast — is interested in establishing some rapport with the narrator, at least enough to unlock the story. Of that the film gives an account; the rest we infer as plausible. “I wish I could give you a kiss,” she says over a video call with an exhausted Cassandro. “It’s always the same: when you’re tired, you cry.” That intervention by Losier betrays an already advanced degree of friendship versus what she reveals on the big screen. There is care in her words and in her trembling lens. She never dwells on the hurts, nor does she pick over Cassandro’s allusions to a childhood with abusive contours or to the homophobia he suffered at the start of his career.

The flesh is weak, and the one thing Losier cannot resist is lingering over the body of a wrestler who has been active for 26 years. It has as much of the anatomy lesson about it as of descriptive body horror: an endless string of fractures; bite scars; new dental prostheses; meniscus surgeries; injuries... In an edit designed to make the viewer wince, Cassandro falls onto his back again and again — and all the perfume of video art could not disguise the whiff of Jackass. Even though wrestling is only theatre, all theatre leaves marks on the skin; a notion all the more relevant for an ageing athlete, unreconciled to the discovery of his own frailty.

But Cassandro’s stagings are especially dense, given the framework of lucha libre. Originating in Mexico in the early twentieth century, it has always lived spellbound, par excellence, with its colourful masks (like those of Rey Mysterio), flamboyant falls and almost aerodynamic acrobatics. And Cassandro, being what is called an “exotic” wrestler, adds further layers of performance: the drag act, the vivid make-up, the chromed and sequinned costumes, hair somewhere between George Michael in 1984, Tina Turner in 1996, and a trimmed Vegeta. Under the sign of Princess Diana, he is the “Liberace of lucha libre”.

We did not need this figure to “queer” a practice already founded on sweat, muscle and drama — inevitably homoerotic, as Losier’s images bring out. Even so, the “exotic” enriches it. Heather Levi has studied lucha libre as a space of negotiation between the macho and the maricón: masculinities in a brawl. A choreographed brawl, to be sure, yet more than a mere game.

Mass entertainment will always find echoes in those who follow it. Not every “exotic” is gay, but Cassandro is an example of how lucha libre has given homosexual men a social lift, ever since the 1940s: a competitive arena where they can display their physical strength, free of the macho corset, free to embrace femininity and camp.

These are not the colours in which Cassandro, the Exotico! is painted — perhaps precisely because it has no qualms about showing Cassandro in all his breadth. He is Saúl Armendáriz: the child from the city of Juárez, the fan of the film Santo contra las momias de Guanajuato (The Mummies of Guanajuato, 1972), the aspiring luchador. He is the winner of the 1992 UWA World Lightweight Championship (the year of Selena’s “Como La Flor”, which we hear in the documentary); he is the recovering addict, a spiritual and resigned man. He is the flowered apparition in the desert. The ropes of the ring do not hold him in — and not only because he can always surprise us with a suicide dive.