This review appears in the August 2018 edition of Sight & Sound. Reprinted with permission.
‘Before I was a fag,’ sings Linn da Quebrada. ‘Now I’m a tranny.’ Intersectional complexities of sexuality and gender – not to mention race, class and the power dynamics of language – are the raw material for Tranny Fag (Bixa Travesty), Kiko Goifman and Claudia Priscilla’s documentary portrait of da Quebrada, a Sao Paolo-based funk musician and artist whose identity as a working-class trans woman of colour deeply informs her artistic practice.
It’s a film fully aligned with its subject, presenting her life and work in her own words and apparently on her own terms. This makes for the powerful centring of kinds of experience that often remain marginalised even within LGBTQ+ contexts but also results in a work that feels limited, even cloistered in its scope and tone.
Da Quebrada is a charismatic and compelling individual, a bold and dynamic performer and an insightful and articulate social critic. Concert footage showcases songs that robustly dissect the effects of machismo and patriarchy in society and within the LGBTQ+ scene itself while celebrating queer black self-assertion and getting a crowd pumping.
The same sensibility unleashed on stage is unpacked in more nuance in conversation, especially with da Quebrada’s close collaborator and friend Jup do Bairro: there are charming, devastating analyses of subjects including who gets to name and therefore control reality, why it is politically important to love oneself, whether some trans identities are overinvested in exaggerated ideas of femininity and how to negotiate an increasingly transactional sexual culture.
The film powerfully locates such discourse as an aspect of dignified and supportive daily life – for instance, when da Quebrada constructively argues with her mother over the established notion that poverty is instructive. Her friendship with do Bairro also emerges as potent, nourishing and loving.
The film’s form, however, feels less confident and directional than its subject and her sensibility. Goifman and Priscilla convey a convincing sense of being in da Quebrada and do Bairro’s company but don’t offer much in the way of wider context. Da Quebrada offers an informal survey of earlier aspects of her life and work by reviewing old photos and videos, including some related to her experiences with cancer as well as earlier variations on her performance persona.
But the influences and forces shaping her identity and expression remain pretty vague, as do her longer-term ambitions and aspirations. There is perhaps some queer value in resisting the idea that lives and careers should follow linear trajectories – but nor does the film provide much detail on how da Quebrada finds joy against the grain of daily material conditions. Rather, there’s a focus on what feel like collaborative moments between filmmakers and subjects conceived for the purposes of the present project: sequences of da Quebrada singing in the shower or showering with her mother; an extended bit of business to do with a mislaid costume glove; da Quebrada and do Bairro in the bath, at the sauna or engaging in witchy dance-battle in the woods.
The formal pay-off of such gambits is less evident than the sense of affection and mutual investment underpinning them – and this perhaps is illustration enough of da Quebrada’s argument for the need, in the face of rejection, to “invent a space for myself”.
Tranny Fag is released in the UK on. The August 2018 edition of Sight and Sound is now available.
