Winning twenty-one awards abroad -- and now one of the offerings in "Another Wave: Global Queer Cinema," a Museum of Modern Art program -- Karim Ainouz’s “based on a true story” Madame Satã never caught on here during its first go-around, a failure many attributed to its controversial hero and subject matter. Granted that a riveting Lázaro Ramos brazenly flashes the core of white dread of black sexuality, a deeper look reveals that the true theme is an individual’s élan vital that, stoppered in a rage, needs to find its outlet path. A wild animal head-banging a wall, observes love -- not lover -- Laurita (Marcelia Cartaxo), a Valentino-Weissmuller-Gary Cooper whose violent swagger masks but cannot negate his generous heart and hunger for self-expression.

Too, viewers found difficulty with the realization via vignettes and resulting shallow, confusing array of characters. The central people do solidify out, however, and their fates are engaging in a nighttime of bright colors so subdued it seems colorized sepia in soft focus and sensuous brown skin-white skin contrast. Not the implications, but a rawness will make mainstreamers uneasy in what is an impressionistic rendering of the life of João Francisco dos Santos (Ramos).

Outside sources claim the man’s parents were slaves -- though in fact Brazil abolished the institution twelve years before his birth in 1900 -- who sold their son when he was seven. The film opens with a May 12, 1932, mug shot of his battered face, while a magistrate’s voice (Eduardo Coutinho) sentences to ten years this “trouble-maker, snake, gambler, pederast without education, repeat offender [who] shaves his eyebrows, hates society, mutilates women and associates with whores.” This tribunal frame will appear near, but not at, the end, as story begins in the club where he is dresser to a faux chanteuse whose Scheherazade-cruel sultan lyrics he lip-synchs offstage.

Effeminately macho, he is attractively, dangerously lithe as a panther, a familiar figure in Rio’s Lapa. Alternately loving and taunting, living with and supporting rescued out-of-town prostitute Laurita, her (not his) baby girl he dotes on, and hysterical housemaid “limp queen” Tabú (Flavio Bauraqui), he is not above scams or robbery, quick to defend his or his family’s honor, and has recently taken as lover the fawning, small-time white thief Renatinho (Felipe Marques) attracted to his fighting prowess.

From cabarets, bars, radios, gramophones, there is ‘twenties-‘thirties music everywhere, to drinking, dancing, flirting, until, insulted by the faux French singer and bilked of back pay by their boss, he steals and flees. A “disciple of La [Josephine] Baker . . . born an outlaw and that’s how I’ll live,” he reacts to slights to his clan -- a doorman’s (Lincoln Oliveira) barring them from the chic High Life -- hides from pursuing police, and settles on celebrating loyal Laurita’s birthday by doing a drag queen number at friend Amadór’s (Emiliano Queiroz) neighborly bar. Both film and character blossom, for his Divine Negress success fills the Blue Danube for future performances, and João finds and embraces his outlet in this new stage persona.

An encounter with an insistent, obscenely homophobic drunk precipitates what seems, and should be, final tragedy, but titles introduce and explain a red-hued coda. Released in January 1942, reinvented as Madame Satã (after a Cecil B. DeMille character, Madam Satan), he wins the first of several Carnival fancy dress contests, as the film ends with credits set to his stirring samba more frantic than the earlier coy cabaret routines.

One wishes that these hurried tacked-on minutes had been expanded into more. With its emotionally visual vindication of what João/ Satã’s life has been building up towards, the film’s non-dramatic but exhilarating finale is what clings most memorably. 

(Released by Wellspring Media: not rated by MPAA.)