'Cassandro' is a curious thing

"Cassandro" is a niche movie for a micro-niche audience. It covers not only the Mexican sport of lucho libre, free wrestling, but also the insertion of a feminine streak into that once-solidly masculine fight. "Cassandro" concentrates on the biography of the titular wrestler, who -- maybe -- only a few have heard of outside of the ring or of gay history.

Cassandro is the ring name for a character fashioned by Saúl Armendáriz, a luchador from El Paso, Texas. He started in amateur wrestling as El Topo, The Mole, a reference to his small size. He doesn't want to, but he finally takes on the ring role of the "exótico," who always loses. "Let me guess," said his trainer Sabrina (Roberta Colindrez). "You're always cast as the runt."

El Topo transitions to Cassandro. He borrows the name from an old movie; he sews a costume once worn by his loving mother, Yocasta (Perla De La Rosa). Unlike his peers, Cassandro does not wear a mask: he makes up his face, accenting his eyes like Amy Winehouse. 

Director Roger Ross Williams, who has won Oscars for his documentaries, insinuates flashbacks to Cassandro's youth. As a bastard child, he served as his mother's helpmeet and longed for a relationship with his censorious father. The film concentrates on the late Eighties when Cassandro fought his way out of shadow into limelight, his campy sequins asparkling. In the script by Williams and David Teague, drugs and depression are addressed as is homophobia but not the scourge of AIDS. 

Dialogue is in Spanish and English, as befits the story of a man who grew up on the border towns of Texas and Mexico. That bi-lingual dialogue is paramount in the love scenes between Saúl and Gerardo (Raúl Castillo), his married lover. Saúl invites Cassandro into their bed in the third person. "Don't you think he's sexy?" Saúl asks. The couple's sexual wrestling is more natural than any in the ring. As El Topo, Saúl, and Cassandro, Gael Garcia Bernal commands the follow spot. Ever since "Y tu mamá tambien" in 2001, Garcia Bernal, a son of show business, has exacted attention. In "Cassandro," he dances boldly, teasingly like an acrobat.  

Unfortunately,  for all its efforts to tell the story of this man, who brought glitzy femininity into the wrestling ring, "Cassandro" feels as fake as lucha libre. It's a curiosity.