Documentarian Henrique Goldman applies a naturalistic style to a soapy subject for his second narrative feature, Princesa, which was based on the memoirs of a transsexual prostitute. Ingrid de Souza plays the Brazilian title character, who moves to Milan to ply her trade and earn money to complete her sexual reassignment from man to woman. One of de Souza's married, straight-arrow customers, Cesare Bocci feels so ashamed by his initial violent reaction to her (upon discovering she isn't all woman) that he takes her out to dinner and makes her his mistress. The rest of the cast is populated by actual cross-gendered and cross-dressing folk from Brazil and Italy, none of whom have previously acted in film. The amateur performers and the gritty, often handheld camera work give Princesa a raw look appropriate to its subject matter. The film exists in the shady area where passion meets commerce, and true feelings are difficult to discern over the clinking of coins. Goldman captures the fog and creates a series of indelible images—a gaudy framed print of breasts so pendulous that they almost look like testicles, de Souza instinctively covering herself so that her masculine lumps won't show, her colleagues flaunting their fake breasts to potential customers—that speak to sexual confusion. But even though the plot of Princesa has been extrapolated from a true story, the tumultuous love affair between de Souza and Bocci ranges too far into tawdry melodrama. The dime-store dialogue about dreams and true love sounds especially thin coming from non-professional actors, and Goldman's scenes deal with the winking, giggly surface of transsexual prostitution as often as they strike deeper chords. (The montage of comic blow jobs is particularly egregious.) Princesa is an entirely different type of movie, but this year's film adaptation of the John Cameron Mitchell musical Hedwig & The Angry Inch is more fun and more intuitive when it comes to relating the essence of those in the gender netherlands. Princesa, oddly enough, plays the material too straight.