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.
Our guide to this world is Saúl Armendáriz, a real-life lucha libre queer pioneer, wonderfully played here as a scrappy up-and-comer by Gael García Bernal. Saúl is an outsider, and not just because he's gay. He's a Mexican American wrestler from El Paso who comes to Ciudad Juárez for the fights. He's scrawnier than most fighters, and thus often gets cast as the runt — and the runt, of course, never wins.
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.
Saúl loves his new persona, in part because the aggressively showy Cassandro allows him to perform his queerness in ways that he's had to repress for much of his life. Some of the details are drawn from the real Saúl's background, which was chronicled in the 2018 documentarySaúl came out as gay when he was a teenager and was rejected by his father, a distant presence in his life to begin with.
That's not such a bad thing. Williams clearly wants to celebrate his subject as a groundbreaking figure in lucha libre culture, and he has little interest in embellishing for dramatic effect. With a lead as strong as the one he has here, there's no need. Bernal has always been a wonderful actor, so it's saying a lot that this performance ranks among his best.
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