Bernal flirts and struts and gives one of the best performances of his career in a film inspired by the life of Mexican American professional wrestling star Saúl Armendáriz.
It begins in the Mexican border town of Ciudad Juárez, where hulking wrestlers, or, clobber each other in the ring. They sport bright-colored masks, skin-tight costumes and menacing monikers like"the Executioner of Tijuana." They smash each other over the head with chairs or guitars while onlookers cheer and jeer from the sidelines. The outcome may be predetermined, but there's still real drama in this mix of brutal sport and choreographed ballet.
But Saúl wants to win, and to make a name for himself. His opening comes when his coach, played by Roberta Colindrez, encourages him to consider becoming anWhen Saúl first steps into the ring as his new exótico persona, Cassandro, he receives plenty of anti-gay slurs from the crowd. The movie shows us how, in lucha libre culture, queer-coded performance and rampant homophobia exist side-by-side.
But Cassandro soon makes clear that he's not just a fall guy or an object of ridicule. He weaponizes his speed, his lithe physique and his flirtatious charm, disarming his opponentshis onlookers. And after a tough first bout, he starts to win over the crowd, which actually likes seeing the exótico win for a change.
The director Roger Ross Williams, who wrote the script with David Teague, directs even the bloodier wrestling scenes with an elegance that makes us aware of the artifice; this isn't exactly theof lucha libre movies, and it isn't trying to be. The wrestling itself feels a little sanitized compared with the documentary, which showed many of Saúl's gruesome injuries in the ring, several of which required surgery.
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