From raging bulls to aging wrestlers, the ring has long provided a place for films to grapple with themes of masculinity. Roger Ross Williams’s rousing wrestling biopic Cassandro tells the story of a man, Saúl Armendáriz (Gael García Bernal), who rose to the very top of the industry by grabbing its outdated gender conventions and flipping them on their heads.
The film begins in the world of 1980s lucha libre, where the most aggressive brand of machismo has everyone in a chokehold. The wrestlers throw homophobic barbs at each other in the locker room before the matches begin, and the crowd takes up those same slurs after the bell rings. In both cases, the person most often on the receiving end is the night’s exótico, a wrestler defined by their flamboyant femininity. Naturally, the exótico is never allowed to win, as they’re here to be defeated by their more masculine opponent and to be laughed at by the audience.
One telling detail that Cassandro quietly calls attention to is the fact that while the other luchadores get to wear masks, the exótico is expected to keep their face uncovered. When we first meet Saúl, he’s wrestling in unglamorous backroom bouts in Juárez under the even less glamorous persona of El Topo. The promoters don’t see much potential in a scrawny kid like Saúl, who spends his nights getting tossed around and pinned down by opponents twice his size before driving back to his mother, Yocasta (Perla De La Rosa), in El Paso. His father abandoned them when Saúl came out at 15, so now the two of them live, work, and chain-smoke together.
Everything changes thanks to two people: Sabrina (Roberta Colindrez), the hardy trainer who sees Saúl’s true potential, and Lorenzo (Joaquín Cosío), the wrestling manager with connections aplenty. The two of them are determined to take Saúl all the way to the top, but perhaps the most important person who enters his life at this moment is Cassandro, an alter ego he adopts by stripping off his mask and replacing it with a pair of perfectly mascaraed eyes and a set of ruby-red lips. Outfitted in an extravagant leopard-print costume, Saúl comes up with a gimmick that will set him apart from everyone else in the industry: that this exótico is going to win.
Watching Bernal transform as he comes swaggering into the ring as Cassandro for the first time is truly electrifying. Whether he’s blowing kisses from the top rope or writhing sensually out of a submission hold, Bernal emanates the sort of larger-than-life charisma that the outsized world of wrestling and its packed arenas demand. And the actor is just as impressive out of the ring. One later scene sees Bernal’s character staring directly into the camera while he undergoes a heartbreaking conversation, allowing the actor to give Saúl all these delicate little expressions that are the polar opposite of Cassandro’s huge pantomime gestures.
Williams’s film also skillfully captures the way in which a wrestling bout both draws from and directs the energy of the crowd. Cassandro comes into his first match as a reviled figure, boos and slurs raining down on him while he sashays down the walkway to a Spanish cover of “I Will Survive.” But the crowd’s hostility doesn’t faze him. In fact, he feeds on it, a beaming smile on his face while he taunts his opponent and pulls off one audacious move after another.
The crowd is unable to resist the sheer magnetic force of his performance. Turns out, centuries of macho culture and Catholic conservatism are no match for a perfectly executed hurricanrana. Wrestling might be a scripted affair, but it’s beholden to the will of the crowd and pretty soon the promoters have no choice but to start scheduling matches in which Cassandro gets to win. In these spectacular fight sequences, all smoke-filled air and too-bright spotlights, Saúl shows us a man changing the narrative in real time. And like any good fighter film, Cassandro builds to the sort of incredible final bout that makes your hairs stand up and the rest of your body want to.
Perhaps the oddest thing about the way Saúl’s unlikely rise to superstardom is dramatized is that, once he has won that first crowd round, the rest of his journey is relatively unobstructed. He engages in a fraught romance with his lover, Gerardo (Raúl Castillo), endures one grumbled complaint from a fellow wrestler about flouting sport’s “traditions,” and has the odd moment of self-doubt. But these potential moments of conflict are overcome quickly and easily.
That means that Cassandro stops short of being an incendiary slice of queer cinema. It also isn’t a truly honest depiction of the grueling physical toll that a sport takes on its participants (the real-life Armendáriz underwent many surgeries and had his teeth replaced three times). Maybe the film is a little too safe and a little too tidy to do full justice to its subject’s subversive force. But that also allows it to be more of a pure celebration of an iconic, and in many places under-sung, hero. In a medium where so many gays are buried to elicit a wider audience’s sympathy, Cassandro gets to fly high—and he puts on one hell of a show in the process.
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