Gael Garcia Bernal’s ‘magnetic’ performance as gay wrestler
The Mexican actor plays a wannabe professional wrestler whose career takes off when he agrees to become an “exotica” - donning a leopard print leotard - in Amazon Prime drama Cassandro.
Cassandro (MA15+)
Amazon Prime
★★★
“That guy has no poetry. None.” So says wannabe professional wrestler Saul Armendariz (Mexican actor Gael Garcia Bernal) in the biographical drama Cassandro.
He’s speaking after losing to a famous wrestler named Giganto. He’s right. Giganto is an unpoetic ox in a rigged theatrical sport that is all about make-believe.
The best scene follows soon after. The skinny, pretty Saul meets a female wrestler turned trainer (Roberta Colindrez) who looks him up and down and says, “Let me guess. You’re always cast as the runt?”
He is. She persuades him to become an “exotica”: a male wrestler in drag. He changes his ring name to Cassandro, puts on makeup, plucks his eyebrows and lands a rematch with Giganto (played by a real wrestler with a far scarier name: Murder Clown).
He sashays into the ring in a leopard print leotard to a Spanish language rendition of Gloria Gaynor’s I Will Survive. He looks, as the fight announcer will put it, as if he’s come “straight from the beauty parlour”. The crowd screams homophobic slurs.
Cassandro, who is gay, slaps his buttocks and blows them kisses. During the fight he milks the mano a mano wrestling positions for every ounce of sexual innuendo.
It’s a wonderful scene – credit to the star and to cinematographer Matias Penachino – that sets up the pioneering biographical story to come. Cassandro wants to become an accepted gay wrestler and, an even bigger ask, an exotica who is allowed to win a sport where the outcome is pre-decided.
As I watched I thought about boxing movies, where the challenge is to make the fights look real. Here it’s about making them look real to the audience in the stands but not to us. This is well done.
The setting is the late 1980s. Cassandro is a Mexican-American who lives in Texas but competes in Mexico where “lucha libre” (free fight) wrestling is a popular national pastime. It certainly is free when it comes to the rules. In one fight a wrestler wins by clunking his opponent with a guitar. Cassandro looks on in appreciation at this form of beat poetry.
What happens in the ring is only part of the drama. Cassandro lives with his mother (Perla De La Rosa), who pays the rent by doing other people’s laundry. He aims to win enough to buy her a house. His father is absent and there are moving childhood flashbacks as to why. This 107-minute film is the feature directorial debut of African-American filmmaker Roger Ross Williams, who won an Oscar for his 2010 short Music By Prudence. He co-wrote the script with David Teague.
Most of the dialogue is in Spanish with English subtitles, though some of it is in English.
The story is drawn from life. The director made a short documentary about Cassandro, The Man Without a Mask, in 2016 and French filmmaker Marie Losier made a full-length one in 2018. The wrestler with the mask, the Son of Santos, appears as himself in this new film and it’s a touching moment.
Garcia Bernal, perhaps best known as the young Che Guevara in The Motorcycle Diaries (2005), is magnetic. Cassandro is charismatic and vulnerable. Most of all he is himself, a gay man in a macho sport who believes he should be a winner. As the ring announcer predicts when the blond-locked Cassandro makes his debut, “This is going to get ugly.”
Dumb Money (MA15+)
In cinemas
★★★
If you put a few grand into a stock and it jumped in value to half a million, would you sell? That’s one of the bottom-line questions of Dumb Money, an Australian-directed dramatisation of one of Wall Street’s more recent moments of craziness.
The dumb money of the title is the ordinary people’s investments that the “smart” end of town manipulates to make a motza. When one hedge-fund billionaire is asked how he became so rich, he replies, “Dumb money”.
This changes, briefly, in January 2021 when small investors, with time on their hands because of Covid lockdowns and led by an online financial renegade, pile into “mom-and-pop” stocks that the big bulls and bears think are worthless.
The weight of their money – and their refusal to sell – drives up the value of companies the hedge funds have “shorted”: that is, bet on to sink. The Wall Street wolves remain confident the dumb money will soon return to the dunce corner and continue to short the stocks. “Who is this schmuck?’’ one asks.
He’s speaking of the real-life Keith Gill (an impressive Paul Dano), a financial adviser who in his down time broadcasts online stock tips – and reveals his own investment holdings – under the moniker Roaring Kitty.
He’s a capital-N nerd who wears shirts with cats on them and a red headband like, as his younger brother (Pete Davidson) says, an “ugly Bjorn Borg”.
He dips chicken tenders into flutes of champagne.
He’s married and has a baby. He puts the family’s life savings into the video game store GameStop and sits tight. His followers – shown here as a single-mum nurse, a GameStop shop assistant and two students deep in college debt – stick with him.
While the small investors turn their savings into fortunes, on paper, the hedge funds teeter on bankruptcy.
There’s a telling moment when the wife of a hedge-fund boss (a well-cast Seth Rogen) asks how much he lost today.
“One billion,’’ he says. She follows up by asking about yesterday. “One billion.”
This drawn-from-life movie is directed by Australian filmmaker David Gillespie, who took a similar approach in I, Tonya (2017), starring Margot Robbie. It bears similarities to The Big Short (2015), about the 2008 financial crash, in which, as it happens, mortgage-backed bonds are explained by Robbie in a bubble bath. It is based on Ben Mezrich’s 2021 book The Antisocial Network and scripted by former Wall Street Journal reporters Lauren Schuker Blum and Rebecca Angelo, who focus the drama on GameStop.
This narrowing of the field – the 2021 “short squeeze” involved a handful of stocks – is a sensible way to make the story easier to tell. You don’t need a business degree to watch this movie, though some knowledge of the basics will help.
When Gill’s $US97,000 investment reaches $US11m and he does not cash in, it’s his truck driver father who asks the obvious question: “What the f--k is wrong with you?”
It’s a question that leads to another one. Will Gill remain a fight-to-the-death revolutionary or will he turn into another Wall Street gangster?
This 104-minute movie is a brisk, informative, entertaining telling of a financial David v Goliath battle that led to congressional hearings.
It explores how the internet and social media have made the financial playing field more accessible and more volatile. When Elon Musk tweeted one word on January 26, 2021 – “Gamestonk!!” – what followed was more than a little crazy.
Where it does its own short sell, however, is on the human side of the story.
Gill, his wife (an underused Shailene Woodley), the small investors and the hedge-fund managers are people who we learn little about, other than their bank balances, which is more or less the opposite of the people-first, profits-second story the comedy-drama is attempting to tell.
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