'Cassandro' is the Latest Flashy Example of the Biopic-As-Ad-For-Its-Subject

Gael Garcia Bernal shines in a winning but empty biopic about a famous "exótico."

Below, my review for Cassandro, currently generating awards buzz for Gael Garcia Bernal and streaming on Prime Video. This one is free, so if you enjoy it, please share. And if you love it, consider a paid subscription. The eternal equation: mo’ money = mo’ #content.

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There’s a scene midway through Cassandro that’s so fascinating in its absurdity that I can’t get it out of my mind. “Cassandro,” aka Saúl Armendáriz, played with depth and sensitivity by Gael Garcia Bernal, appears on an evening chat show hosted by a legendary “luchador” named “Hijo Del Santo.”

Hijo Del Santo is, as always, wearing his trademark bedazzled silver luchador mask, just like he was in the wrestling match during which he was introduced earlier in the film. Only now his barrel torso is clad in a newscaster’s suit and tie. He walks through the studio, speaking directly to the cameras, and asking Cassandro “important mainstream journalist” type questions, like some arcane new twist on Phil Hartman’s “Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer” bit. Formal Luchador Journalist, say, or This American Life, with Dave Batista.

This luchador-turned-news-magazine host plays it entirely straight, asking Cassandro questions about life and career just like he would if he was Leslie Stahl or Bob Costas. Cassandro answers them enthusiastically, at one point fielding a question from the studio audience, from a gay teen who tells Cassandro how Cassandro inspired him to come out to his dad — who stands next to his son, smiling supportively. Cassandro’s eyes shine, evoking the bittersweetness of experiencing both the career culmination he’s always dreamt of and the conciliatory moment he’s never had with his own father simultaneously.

It feels like the kind of scene that happens when a young starlet lounges in her crappy apartment, pantomiming accepting her Oscar, or daydreaming about what she’ll say to James Lipton on Inside The Actor’s Studio one day. Only in this case I was left waiting in vain for a button moment, a dissolve — any indication that this scene had taken place in Cassandro’s imagination.

It hadn’t, and the scene is apparently meant to depict literal reality. Gay kids being inspired to come out to their dads by drag queen wrestlers on an intellectual news magazine shows hosted by men in bedazzled luchador masks is apparently just a thing that happens in Mexico.

All of Cassandro is like this to some extent — a banal message about being true to yourself and following your dreams wrapped in bizarre and surreal circumstances that the film refuses to unpack in any meaningful way. It feels in a lot of ways like the logical end result of this type of biopic. It’s essentially an ad, and ads sell, they don’t explore.

Saúl Armendáriz is a gay pipsqueak wrestler who doesn’t want to be an “exótico” — a flamboyant, traditionally queeny type of wrestler who usually gets beat up by the babyface — because exóticos never win. Yet his trainer, Anarchia (Roberta Colindrez) urges him to, and eventually he gives in. Saúl creates Cassandro, deciding that he will be an exótico who wins. And so he does. The crowd loves him. This is basically the film’s entire arc.

What’s missing is any discussion of what it means for a loosely-scripted entertainer like a wrestler to “win.” Is that better? Does it make you a bigger star or a more meaningful artist? Director Roger Ross Williams (an acclaimed documentarian making his fiction feature debut here, essentially adapting his own 2016 documentary about Cassandro) shoots the wrestling championship belt as if its symbology is self-evident. At least for this non-wrestling fan, it isn’t. Isn’t the match kind of a story? And thus, the belt more or less a prop for helping to tell it?

It’s fun that exóticos are making overt the natural homoeroticism inherent in pro wrestling — a staged competition that at its heart is really about oiled muscles and pageantry. The wrestler’s job isn’t realism or athletic prowess (though it certainly requires it), it’s to give the crowd catharsis. Extrapolating a bit, the exótico seems mostly designed to provide the audience a chance to shout all the gay slurs that Spanish in particular seems to have so many of (could just be that I went to middle school with more Spanish speakers than any other language).

And so the big question becomes: why was Cassandro right for this moment? What made him different from earlier exóticos? How did he make the crowd love him? What was happening in Mexican society and/or the wrestling world that they were suddenly ready to see an exótico win, and how did Cassandro capitalize on it?

The movie mostly eschews any of this in favor of an extended, stylized victory lap. There’s no real turning point in Cassandro, just a protagonist’s decision that works out well. With great acting and heartfelt performances — from Bernal and Colindrez, but also Raúl Castillo as Cassandro’s closeted boyfriend, Perla De La Rosa as his chaotic mom, and Bad Bunny as a partyboy promoter — it’s 90 minutes that fly right by. But it has such tunnel vision for the message (Cassandro was an inspiring wrestler!) that there isn’t much left to hold onto. It’s like a collection of trailer lines begging for some context.

Probably the most famous biopic ever was Citizen Kane, and that was a film so critical of its still-living, massively powerful subject (William Randolph Hearst) that Hearst tried to pay off the studio not to release it. Nowadays, biopic directors are more apt to say that they’re “telling [the subject]’s truth” (as Eva Longoria said in defense of her biopic about the guy who didn’t actually invent Flamin Hot Cheetos) than take someone down. Cassandro isn’t a blatant image management exercise in the way that, say, King Richard or Rocketman were (both produced by the subject, though this also goes for virtually all music or sports figure biopics), nor am I suggesting that Saúl Armendáriz needs to be dissected like William Randolph Hearst.

Cassandro is merely applying the format of now-fashionable image management biopics, and in so doing, prioritizes explaining what makes its subject inspiring over what makes him interesting.