Private Desert Review: Parched for a Less Dated Depiction of Trans Experience

Aly Muritiba’s film is always telling the viewer that death-ness and trans-ness bear the intimacy of Siamese sisters.

Private Desert
Photo: Kino Lorber

Cinema’s forays into the lives of trans people are almost always marked by a limited understanding, or fantasy, of what “trans” is. It normally involves the binary presumption of a linear, fixed, and necessary transition, which a hot straight cis guy isn’t initially privy to. Aly Muritiba’s Private Desert partially overcomes such myopic notions of trans lived experience by portraying the ephemeral trans feminine practices of Sara (Pedro Fasanaro), a blue-collar worker in the northeast of Brazil living as a male, Robson, during the day, only able to indulge in her womanhood online and on the occasional dance floor.

The rare instances of private and semi-public feminine embodiment are, for Sara, full of joy—the film’s cinematography itself takes on a dreamy sheen when we see her dressed up—but also anxiety. What if someone recognizes Sara at the club as Robson behind her make-up and wig? And how to sustain her remote relationship with Daniel (Antonio Saboia), the romantic partner who lives thousands of miles away, and with whom she exchanges WhatsApp messages all day without having ever met him in person, presuming she’s a cis woman?

Muritiba’s film initially focuses on Daniel, a police officer living in southern Brazil who’s on unpaid leave following a violent incident, and who’s obsessed with the beautiful girl on the other side of the screen. Daniel is your typically butch heterosexual man with zero emotional intelligence and a repressed stance that stiffens him into a cardboard character. It isn’t until Sara shows up that the film snaps out of one-dimensional tedium. And she only materializes beyond a fleeting voice in an audio message once she ghosts Daniel, triggering him to drop everything and drive from Curitiba to Petrolina, almost 2,000 miles, to find her.

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Private Desert is hampered by the forced dialogue and acting (apart from the great Fasanaro) that mar so many Brazilian movies, pitched as they are either as a soap opera or a gauche imitation of self-important Hollywood drama, sometimes both. Muritiba creates a sort of murder mystery atmosphere around his main characters, with Daniel plastering Sara’s small town with pixilated copies of her photograph and asking strangers if they’ve seen her. Tapping into cinema’s tropes of a murder investigation to make Sara take shape makes it feel like trans desire, or desire for trans bodies, could only be conjured through sepulchral means.

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Nobody is dead yet by the time Sara and Daniel finally meet, but the path toward the trans woman’s manifestation is still shrouded in death, and the predictably scandalous revelation of her trans-ness. Always the mise-en-scène tells us that death-ness and trans-ness bear the intimacy of Siamese sisters. And the man who comes to the trans woman’s encounter already bears the traces of an agent of violence: Daniel is the subject of brutality par excellence as a member of the police academy, the son of a police officer himself, and he sports a cast on his forearm for most of the film, alluding to an enigmatic assault he was involved in, which may cost him his job for good. Daniel, it seems, is too brutal even for the Brazilian police.

Thus, Private Desert doesn’t escape many of the toxic narrative traditions that have informed depictions of trans woman as an inevitably catfishing bearer of a shocking, if not disgusting, secret. We may hope all we want for her straight cis counterpart to forgive her for her trans-ness and consummate their love. But that is ultimately futile. Love between a straight man and a trans woman seems to be as untenable as the sex between them isn’t.

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At the same time, Private Desert is one of the only films to look at what many may dismiss as a “cross-dresser” and see an actual woman, despite the fact that she hasn’t “transitioned,” and probably never will. Cam Archer’s Wild Tigers I Have Known considers its main character, a teen pretending to be a cis woman on the phone to her butch high school crush, with a similarly dignifying gaze. Muritiba’s much more predictable film gives us the dramatic reveal of the trans woman’s genitals that out her, followed by the man’s outrage. The only surprise is that Daniel, unlike Stephen Rea’s character in The Crying Game, doesn’t vomit in the moment. But Muritiba also allows Sara to have her say afterward, and while the breaking of the spell leaves Daniel disoriented, it makes Sara stronger, and freer to live, with or without him.

Score: 
 Cast: Pedro Fasanaro, Antonio Saboia, Thomas Aquino, Zezita Matos  Director: Aly Muritiba  Screenwriter: Henrique Dos Santos, Aly Muritiba  Distributor: Kino Lorber  Running Time: 121 min  Rating: NR  Year: 2021  Buy: Video

Diego Semerene

Diego Semerene is an assistant professor of queer and transgender media at the University of Amsterdam.

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