Twenty Queers of Madame Satã

Another flash, then another, and the cheers and applause on the soundtrack grow louder, forming an indiscernible mixture of noises. The opening credits seem to announce the coming of the title card, but instead another flash brings the sounds to a halt. Now a Black man, his face battered, stares straight at the camera; behind him, a white wall in a nondescript space. He looks defeated, immobile, blinking sparingly when an off-screen voice interrupts the silence to pronounce his full name and add appositives such as “the accused” and “a passive pederast” who smokes, drinks, gambles, alters his own voice to sound feminine, struggles to communicate, speaks in slang, has no religion, and is prone to criminal activity.

The opening scene of the film, preceded by brief credits under those cheerful sounds, starts to map out João’s complexity. While the cheers encompass a timeless euphoria, the last of the flashes launches a tight medium shot that recalls mug shots, introducing the character through a visual contemplation of his face. The carnival sounds that precede the scene have now given way to complete silence, drawing attention again to the visual content of the shot: João’s beaten face looking straight at the camera.

Like the framing of João’s torso, the pronouncement of his full name is oppressive insofar as it indicates the superiority of the state and its capacity to identify and mark him as unlawful. Moreover, his police records initiate a process of connection between the character’s identity and the patronizing and pejorative categorizations executed by the police, which pin him down as a criminal and manufacture an image of a “marginal.”⁷ The contrast between the sonic extravaganza of the opening credits and the monotone bluntness of João’s face here emphasizes the disparity between João’s ideal life (represented through spectacle) and the reality in which he actually lives (represented through violence).

Apparently sealing his fate, this arrest becomes the catalytic incident that unravels a complex character whose body is disciplined and regulated by the police just as his identity is imposed and named by official institutions and their exclusionary ideology. In defiance, João imprints the carnivalized onstage image of Madame Satã, his alter ego, onto the Brazilian imaginary, managing to endure not as the beaten face that opens the film but as the ethereal, disidentified, and disidentifying figure who closes it. In his trajectory, João incorporates what José Esteban Muñoz has theorized as disidentification: the “survival strategies the minority subject practices in order to negotiate a phobic majoritarian public sphere that continuously elides or punishes the existence of subjects who do not conform to the phantasm of normative citizenship.”⁸ Aïnouz conceived of the film while still in New York, at around the same time that Muñoz elaborated these theories, grounded in queer performance artists active in the city, such as Vaginal Creme Davis and Carmelita Tropicana. Madame Satã carries onstage the same transgressive force of those performers, as though bridging 1930s Lapa and 1990s New York.

The celebration of the film today might feel anachronistic in light of the new films coming out of Brazil, as Black and queer filmmakers in the country are finally enjoying an unprecedented, albeit belated, level of attention. This was not so in 2002.⁹ While now an “incontestable reality,” black cinema was at that time still a marginalized enterprise that, precisely because it was independent and marginalized, had relatively little impact on the politics and composition of black representation in Brazilian media more broadly.

In 2002, however, Aïnouz’s audacity in centering Madame Satã’s narrative on a Black character who defied positive imagery, a queer Black character based on a historical figure, was notable. In addition, Ramos’s performance at its center merits recognition as “authorial” as he inscribes the title character with layers that go beyond those projected by the script or the cinematography. In his autobiography, Na minha pele, Ramos writes about the liberating process of taking on such a complex character:

Indeed, to convey such complexity in both legible and affective registers is no small feat. Ramos’s performance is a tour de force that lends the film its sensuous and aggressive tones, meticulously modulated by Aïnouz’s deliberate casting choice, aesthetic, and direction. The complexity of which Ramos speaks directly contests the categorization of the police records that marked him with a series of stereotypes of blackness and queerness. Although stamped on João in the opening scene, these stereotypes undergo a revisionist critique throughout the film. The jail scene’s blatant disciplinary oppression backfires and ultimately leaves the impression that labeling and categorizing this character (sometimes, even liking him) is a fool’s errand.

What is left is affect. João is at once seductive and repulsive, pleasurable and disgusting, feminine and masculine, seen and seer, both a push and a pull. It is the seemingly mutually exclusive nature of these poles that indicates there is, in fact, no polarity. João’s magnetism is pure affect: his paradoxes make his behavior and motivations difficult to track, but his chaotic state can be felt in the atmosphere of the performance and mise-en-scène. It comes across in Ramos’s deliberate and deliberately ambivalent gestures (his naked torso and painted face); in Aïnouz’s precise framing, which allows the protagonist to peek through beaded curtains and disappear through door cracks and peepholes; and in Carvalho’s disorienting chiaroscuro lighting that displays and conceals the protagonist as he works the nights.

For the viewer seeking to grasp João as a historical figure, the police records may seem essential, yet they are, at best, irretrievably unreliable and, at worst, deliberately prognostic of a social type—that is, a fabrication. Escaping legibility, these formal elements reinforce the coda of the opening scenes, in which what one sees first is undone by what is seen next, privileging experience and emotion over comprehension.

Interrupting the mug-shot scene, a hard cut brings the title card, “Madame Satã,” written in sparkly sequins against a dark fabric. As strings and a piano play a song, behind a beaded curtain is seen that same black face from the mug shot, now unbeaten, soft, with lips that move as though singing. Reverse shots show an audience of men in suits, drinking their whiskey and puffing their cigarettes. Close-ups detail a costumed dress that flows to the rhythm of the song, alternating with that face, now being touched softly by the character’s own fingers with decidedly feminine gestures.

These close-ups accentuate João’s facial features as he lip-synchs, misleadingly suggesting that he is performing onstage. João is the object of awe and looks starkly different from the character in the police scene, but he remains passive, coded—even while maintaining a gender ambivalence—for heightened visual and erotic impact. Displayed with a conventionally feminizing iconography, his body functions as an erotic object for both spectators and the characters within the narrative—a doubling that Aïnouz employs throughout.

However, a wider shot reveals that João is actually backstage, viewing the singer (Vitória dos Anjos, played by Renata Sorrah) and longing to occupy her place, in society and onstage. The diegetic break enacted by this unveiling of the actual vocal source serves to arrest João’s previous function as an erotic object. The cut repositions him from an object to be looked at to the bearer of the look, simultaneously objectifying but also desiring to replace the female character onstage. João’s gaze at the woman onstage represents an emergent subjectivity. Consequently, a turn in the viewers’ spectatorship occurs in this scene: they experience, perhaps for the first time, the active gaze of the oppressed character through a shot that indicates his point of view. Although João at this point in the narrative is not yet engaged in social ascendance, his gaze already projects fantasies of being recognized as a subject and acclaimed as a performer.

To overcome his social limitations, João develops the perfect weapon: the character of Jamaci (AKA Mulata do Balacochê AKA Madame Satã), who represents his alter ego and channels his femininity. In this identity, he creates a song-and-dance spectacle that is acclaimed only within his community, in private performances. In what Michael Warner would call a “queer counterpublic,” the Lapa neighborhood and its down-market nightclubs function here as circulatory spaces in which “the presumptive heterosexuality that constitutes the closet for individuals in ordinary speech is suspended.”¹¹ Concealed from the forces beyond its frontiers, deviation is the norm, and thus everything is presumed queer(ed), with the goal of transforming “the space of public life itself.”¹²

Richard Parker has identified such counterpublics, in the Brazilian context of queer communities, as “gay enclaves” that provide “a focus for homoerotic interaction” and form the basis for emerging gay communities.¹³ In Aïnouz’s film, the Lapa environment, tolerant of outcasts, mischief, and sexual deviants, is integral to João’s story.¹⁴ Unsurprisingly, then, the different personae from João’s intersectional identity perform roles specifically tailored to his different social spheres. At home, a sexist, masculine, and determined character would appear to be João’s dominant persona, portrayed as an old-world patriarch who sustains the household with iron fists. Although constituting a queer family, the relationship established among João, Laurita, and Tabu in their house is one still modeled on a patriarchal family structure, with João as the sole power holder and decision maker. In the streets and in the bars, meanwhile, a gender-fluid persona takes over João, who becomes a femme fatale stuck in a male body, full of rage, violent inclinations, and a thirst for respect.¹⁵

Because these projected identities are constituted in public performances, the Lapa enclave is also the space where encounters with outsiders—from regulatory bodies such as the police to racist or homophobic individuals—are not only possible, but frequently occurring conflicts and risks for João (and others). Inevitably, Lapa is the space where these different and contradictory publics clash, and João resorts to capoeira to protect and defend himself.

As the son of formerly enslaved people, João employs capoeira in a way that goes beyond the symbolic, reproducing a practice of black resistance in Brazil that remained illegal through the 1930s, and continued to be regulated thereafter.¹⁶ As Lorraine Leu has observed, although the populist discourse of then-president Getúlio Vargas’s regime promoted elements of Afro-Brazilian culture—including a more sanitized and regulated form of capoeira—Afro-descendants still “tended to be prime targets of [state-sanctioned] repression.”¹⁷ Capoeira offers João in the streets the kind of escape that cross-dressing offers him onstage, and eventually assists him in an assault against officers—an encounter that leads to his first arrest. It is both the Black capoeira fighter and the Black drag performer that the police seem to try to wash off João when they strip him naked and hose him off from a distance, not daring to get too close lest they be hit.

Onstage, his transformation is more complete than in the streets or at home. João is fully Jamaci or Madame Satã—sweet, sensual, in tune—the drag queen remade in an ideal, even exotic, feminized form. Never, however, is João completely taken over by any one of his identities; rather, their fluidity constantly evades the power of nominative impositions of an ideology that insists on defining and categorizing difference. João regains his voice and power as the film unspools, through his own agency and commitment to his deviant persona.

João’s stage performance also conveys the very transience of his gender(s). His performance of a peaceful and sentimental Jamaci/Madame Satã contrasts with the violent, masculinized João offstage. This apparent disparity of demeanors becomes critical when a drunkard confronts João after his successful performance in the Danúbio Azul, querying whether he is “playing a man or a woman.” João—or perhaps it is Jamaci—bursts out, stating, “I am a queen by choice! It doesn’t make me any less of a man,” but refrains from physical violence. Arguably, the femininized docility of Jamaci takes over his behavior, despite his rage’s insistence. João’s revenge comes full circle later in the obscurity of the streets, when he shoots the same customer in the back, unannounced.

Madame Satã is all the richer for adopting the tradition of carnivalesque transgression, in which social and aesthetic rules are not just broken but rendered altogether invalid.¹⁸ The spectacle of carnival turns queer practices that would otherwise remain under wraps—or at least in the closet—entirely public, presenting a pathway for queering the world.¹⁹ This link is particularly fitting because of João Francisco dos Santos’s eventual acclamation in Brazil’s carnival parades (as Aïnouz shows during the film’s final credits). Thus the film’s cut between João Francisco dos Santos’s battered face (representing a disciplining of sexual practices) and Madame Satã’s painted face (representing a display of a queer public) constitutes a true rupture and cognitive break.

Madame Satã—the character—reflects Judith Butler’s theory of gender as constituted through performative acts.²⁰ If lived gender is a product of restrictive cultural conventions that maintain a system of compulsory heterosexuality, then to claim to be a certain gender is to at once perform acceptable traits of womanhood or manhood and conceal competing corporeal possibilities. To “do gender” in turn is to embrace the alternatives to such binaries, to perform the infinite possibilities that lie within—as well as outside of—such a polarity. As Teresa de Lauretis has argued, while technologies of gender may promote strict definitions and norms of gender, “the terms of a different construction of gender also exist, in the margins of hegemonic discourses.”²¹

As it returns to the opening scene—the emblematic mug shot—the film’s ending stylistically delivers the very transcendence that Satã’s audience never gets to fully witness or understand. Deploying symbolic and actual violence in their acts of naming, defining, and abducting Madame Satã, the police and the state seemingly win: they define his gender and identity. However, the character’s journey lends a new meaning to that opening shot, retroactively forcing a reinterpretation. The audience is empowered to analyze the way the state sees and disciplines João, in comparison to how João sees and deregulates himself. The viewer learns to detect how Aïnouz’s João transgresses aspects of his own identities.

In a cross-fade, the voice-off that reads the police records is gradually replaced by João’s own performative narration of Jamaci transforming into Madame Satã—a narrative so “queered” that it now departs entirely from the Scheherazade tales he had learned from Vitória’s cabaret performances. On the soundtrack, layered under his voice, are those same sounds that briefly opened the film: cheers, whistles, applause. But there’s a difference. One flash and Jamaci/Madame Satã is on a grand stage, captured in colors so saturated that they blur the image, rendering the triumphant performing body more indecipherable than ever. The camera zooms in and out, unfocused and refocusing full-body shots and close-ups of Satã’s face, as his transformation is met with great—visible and audible—public acclaim.

Solidifying this movement, the film concludes with what looks like archival footage of the actual João Francisco dos Santos performing as Madame Satã during a carnival festivity, in a denouement that would seem to conform to the contours of the traditional biopic genre. Yet the film also traffics in opacity, as realized through narrative ellipses, framing, low-key lighting, camera movement, and an often-narrow depth of field. As such, its ending needs to be qualified not as “revelation” but as an invitation to further discovery. It is there, at the end, that the film lets the subject speak for himself, herself, themself, in an explosion of sounds and colors, through the display of opaque footage behind whose unfocused surface lies a myth. As applause fades out, the myth persists, incongruous and cryptic. Any effort to decipher Madame Satã should, after all, fail.

Final captions disclose that, as Madame Satã, João eventually became popular more publicly, in the streets of Rio de Janeiro, finally achieving that recognition he longed for throughout the film. That his redemption is given through textual caption, postnarratively, rather than integrated into the film via images, serves to reiterate this figure’s transcendental, mysterious, even unrepresentable demeanor and the film’s honorable refusal to confer any simplicity or closure. More than a rediscovery of a historical character—for João/Madame Satã was neither obscure nor an unknown— Madame Satã is a reminder that resistance resurfaces in the least expected ways.²²

Madame Satã offers up a character who refuses to conform, to acquiesce, to be labeled, embedded within a film that also refuses to label, to define, to tame. In the film’s so doing, João’s disidentification becomes “a survival strategy that is employed by a minority spectator to resist and confound socially prescriptive patterns of identification.”²³ With the aid of João, Madame Satã, Ramos, and Aïnouz, the film employs a range of disidentifying practices. And, just as its central character demands attention, the film refuses to look away, committing itself instead to an aesthetic and affective strategy at the limits of gendered/racialized/classed representability.

Today, Madame Satã remains a film built upon a resistant image—an opaque, obscure figure that quivers latently on the screen, distant from the opening close-up of the beaten face, performed but never fully realized. This image is a projection. It begs for a definition that it has always already resisted. It is in this tension—between requesting and resisting—that Madame Satã, the character, the subject, the legend, returns as an idea. João is, in the end, a concept, malleable and unstable. Thanks to Karim Aïnouz, it is Madame Satã, João’s lifelong creation, who triumphs.