‘Cassandro’ Review: Love and Lucha Libre

When Barton Fink, the neurotic screenwriter cooked up by the Coen brothers, scrambles to write down a wrestling image, his friends prescribe the fundamentals. Tell us the person’s ambitions. Entangle him in a romance. You know the drill. Not even in Barton’s most delirious desires might he have envisioned “Cassandro,” a few flamboyant, sequin-clad luchador who takes his ring title from a telenovela. But I guess Barton might have drafted the movie’s define, which makes use of the identical squelchy fitness center bag of methods as many underdog sports activities dramas.

Based on an actual star of Mexican skilled wrestling, or lucha libre, Saúl Armendáriz (Gael García Bernal) is a profoundly uncommon athlete wedged right into a biopic that typically seems like satisfactory stage combating: elegantly executed however drained of hazard.

Directed by Roger Ross Williams (“Life, Animated”), the film depicts the decisive, late-Eighties interval when Saúl ascended out of obscurity and into the massive time, braving numerous coaching montages and some personal miseries on his method to the highest.

We meet the striver in Texas in early maturity, when he’s aiding his mom, Yocasta (Perla De La Rosa), along with her laundry enterprise and wrestling at a close-by membership. Using the title El Topo (The Mole), he tumbles into the ring masked and petite, a pipsqueak doomed to behave as a punching bag reverse giants. “Let me guess. You’re always cast as the runt?” challenges Sabrina (Roberta Colindrez), a neighborhood lucha hotshot and coach. She spies potential in Saúl, and gives to educate him professional bono.

Colindrez, like most of the actors on this film, is a superlative performer. Her character is granted little interiority — she serves by turns as Saúl’s fierce advocate and his shoulder to cry on — however alongside Bernal she radiates a cool glow match for a movie much less shackled by the ebbs and flows of established conference. In conversations with Sabrina, Saúl toggles between English and Spanish, reserving the latter for colloquialisms or teasing, and the combination provides their dialogue an natural rhythm. He makes use of the identical mix of languages together with his lover, Gerardo (Raúl Castillo), a married luchador with youngsters whom Saúl sees in secret.

Saúl’s sexuality is without delay a significant plot level and considerably underexplored. With mild nudging from Sabrina, Saúl, who got here out as a teen and is supported by his mom, quickly reinvents his ring persona because the campy Cassandro, an “exótico,” or luchador who performs with femininity. The character initially attracts slurs and heckling, however shortly (and maybe too effortlessly) begins profitable matches and turns into a fan favourite. This is an period when H.I.V. and AIDS panic was at its shrillest, and though the real-life Cassandro was typically rebuffed by homophobic opponents, the film by no means mentions the epidemic. (Williams wrote the screenplay with David Teague.)

“Cassandro” is at its strongest when it zeros in on the connection between Saúl and Gerardo, who share a bodily intimacy that each echoes their combating careers and acts as an escape from them. Alone, protected from onlookers, the pair tussle in mattress. “Don’t you think he’s sexy?” Saúl says, referring to Cassandro as if he have been a 3rd one who may be part of them.

Williams, an Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker, is an skilled orchestrator of naturalism. The hassle is that lucha libre, constructed on glitz, is something however naturalistic. The confident freedom Saúl channels in mattress by no means makes its approach into scenes within the ring, which are likely to tire when they need to dazzle.

Cassandro
Rated R for medication and slugs. Running time: 1 hour 47 minutes. Watch on Amazon Prime Video.