Icelandic documentarian Olaf de Fleur openly blends fact and
fiction in The Amazing Truth About Queen Raquela, the partially true story of
Filipino transsexual Raquela Rios, who drifts from prostitution to the more
lucrative realm of Internet "ladyboy porn," then winds up moving to Europe when
one of her patrons propositions her via e-mail. Much of the dialogue in Queen
Raquela is
improvised—and some of it delivered directly into the camera,
interview-style—and a lot of the footage was shot in on the fly, with
handheld or hidden cameras. But de Fleur does impose a narrative on this vérité
exercise, in an attempt to concoct a kind of postmodern, grown-up fairytale: a
Cinderella story for the reality-TV age.
Queen Raquela's plotty elements don't always work: The acting in the
story-driving scenes sometimes comes off as amateurish, and the circumstances
that send Rios halfway around the world seem contrived. But de Fleur gets an
astonishingly good performance from Stefan C. Schaefer (one of the film's
co-writers) as the cynical New York porn impresario who finds Raquela and her
ilk alternately disgusting and attractive. Schaefer has a sad-but-true, theme-defining
speech halfway through Queen Raquela about how transsexuals are like cicadas, in that they hide
for most of their lives, then come out and make a lot of noise before dying
young. That idea resounds through the scene where Raquela gets her first HIV
test, and even in more mundane moments, as when she takes a decidedly
unglamorous job at a fish factory in order to realize her dream of touring
Paris. Rios has a grating voice that sounds a little like Henrietta Pussycat
from Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood, but she always does her best to look fabulous, and carry
herself like one of the idle socialites she's seen in magazines. Given the
likelihood of an ultimately nasty end to her lifestyle, any minute Rios spends
not enjoying herself seems like a waste.