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Reviews of Recent Independent, Foreign, & Documentary Films in Theaters and DVD/Home Video
THE AMAZING TRUTH
ABOUT QUEEN RAQUELA
The twist is that Raquela’s not a girl, but a young Filipino man who is living as a woman—a ladyboy, slang for a transgender woman. Sweetly pretty, with waist-length hair and the wardrobe of your average high-school girl, it’s impossible to tell that Raquela was really born a boy named Earvin, even close up without makeup. In one scene, dressed like a boy for a nursing school interview, with hair tucked under a baseball cap, she looks more like a tomboyish girl trying to act tough than an actual young man. Raquela Rios isn’t a professional actress, and the film isn’t exactly fiction or documentary. Director Olaf de Fleur Johannesson found Raquela amongst the ladyboy community in Cebu City in the Philippines and decided to build a film around her. Some incidents are based on real events in her life, others are semi-scripted and improvised. Most of the other people in the film are either real-life friends or relatives of Raquela or friends and crew members Johannesson drafted into service as actors. In the film, Raquela talks about her dreams of going to Europe and finding a heterosexual man who will marry her. She drifts until she gets a job performing, via webcam, for a ladyboy sex site. A transgender friend in Iceland arranges for Raquela to come and work in Iceland for a few months, with the idea being that it will be easier for her to reach her dream location, Paris. The website owner arranges to meet her there, and Raquela sets out to make her dreams come true. Michael is a familiar type—you’ve seen him walking down the street a million miles a minute, shouting into an earpiece about his deal of the moment. He acts like he runs an empire, but it’s an empire run out of a dingy office in what’s probably his apartment. Michael seems like a typical Brooklyn tough guy who’s always talking and always complaining about something—the French, tourists in Paris, Paris being past its glory. It’s hard to understand his motivation for arranging the rendezvous with Raquela. Is he rewarding her for bringing in money to his Website? Does he periodically pick out attractive girls and meet them? Does he believe, from their occasional chats, that there is something special between them? Michael is played by Stefan Schaefer, a friend of the director who is not an actor. He’s very good at reeling off Michael’s glib commentary, but I wonder if a professional might have been able to bring something more to his character. The film has the look of a home movie, with scenes of Raquela talking directly to the camera about her feelings in a familiar reality TV sort of way. Johannesson’s quasi-documentary style, with its aim to recreate and improvise from her life, doesn’t always work. In the production notes, he explains that he decided to reenact a car accident that Raquela had told him about. However, the accident doesn’t pay off in any way. It doesn’t seem to change her or create a turning point in the story. This is a problem that affects the whole film. At the end, Raquela doesn’t seem to have been affected by events; she’s back to where she was at the beginning, and if she’s undergone any kind of change, it’s not apparent. Her story is missing some kind of summation. Raquela is open, charming, and easy to like. The scenes where she and her friends sit around talking about their lives will seem familiar to anyone who has ever been a teenage girl or been around them. She’s so ordinary, in fact, that it’s easy to forget she’s transgender. Her family members don’t seem to have a problem with her living as a woman, and Raquela and her friends are never harassed. Even when she picks a man up on the street, he is fine when she tells him she’s a man. If I was a transgender person and I saw this movie, I would be packing my bags now to head to Cebu City because it seems like a remarkably tolerant place. Johannesson
is pointedly not making the typical transgender story on film, with
family rejection, harassment on the street, or perhaps some physical
violence. Instead, he wants to show that Raquela has the same dream of
love as anyone. He is successful in imparting this message, but then
that leaves us with just another film about a girl hoping to find love.
By removing what makes Raquela different, he takes away what might make
the film different. The Amazing Truth About Queen Raquela is a
pleasant enough slice of life, and Raquela is a nice enough girl to
spend time with, but that’s about it—though we can all appreciate the
lesson of the film, that love is hard to find, no matter who you are.
Kirsten Anderson
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