E-Mail This Article to a Friend MADAME SATÃ

Madame Satã, né João Francisco dos Santos, a black street tough who took the stage to become a cross-dressing legend, wowed audiences in Rio de Janeiro in the ’30s and ’40s — but when will he show up in Karim Aïnouz’s atmospheric and aimless bio-pic of his life? Instead, Aïnouz spends most of the film meandering about João’s sordid origins in the dank alleys and dives of Rio’s Lapa district, where he and his confederates — the "limp fairy" Taboo (Flávio Barauqui), who is João’s much-abused virtual slave; the pretty boy Renatinho (Felippe Marques), who wants to learn João’s fancy-footed fighting style but gets more than he bargained for; and the gold-hearted whore Laurita (Marcélia Cartaxo), whose child João raises as his own — fight, fume, hustle, and get arrested in the brown chiaroscuro squalor. Played by Lázaro Ramos, João is all sweaty torso, bared teeth, painfully processed hair, and naked anger at his social ostracism, softening only in the moments he spends with the child (he actually was the foster father of seven) or when he’s rehearsing the number (about Sheherazade, another and more adept practitioner of delay) that he dreams of one day performing. The long-awaited, too brief turns on stage electrify, but they fail to illuminate the murky turmoil of the life that engendered them. In Portuguese with English subtitles. (105 minutes)