Peter Bradshaw 

Tranny Fag review – cheeky melodrama in real-time portrait

This documentary about transgender artist and performer Linn da Quebrada eschews biography for an in-the-moment snapshot
  
  

Linn da Quebrada in Tranny Fag.
Linn da Quebrada in Tranny Fag. Photograph: ICA

The original Portuguese title is Bixa Travesty – the now uncool term “tranny” being an approximation of that second word, maybe something to be reclaimed. (“Bixa” is found on urbandictionary.com for “faggot” or “loser”). This film is a portrait of Linn da Quebrada, a transgender woman from São Paulo who is a rapper, musician, broadcaster and performance artist. Bixa Travesty is a track on her album, in which with cheeky melodrama she depicts herself as: “With just one breast, hair dragging on the floor / And in a bloody hand, a heart.”

The film shows her in performance, in the studio, reflecting on the nature of identity, hanging out with friends, and also affectionately chatting with her mum in the apartment where she grew up, arguing about the community’s defeatist habit of romanticising poverty. She aligns the experience of being trans with the marginalisation involved in having no money.

It is a portrait in the present tense, in that there is no biographical sense of its subject, no sense of who Da Quebrada was before transitioning. There might be a kind of correctness in regarding that whole subject as a disloyal dead letter. Da Quebrada is an almost inexhaustible self-dramatiser and a bit of a narcissist – although no more of a narcissist than the rest of the showbusiness straights. Her identity is something that she must always insist on. An interesting, limited study.

 

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