Enigma (dir. Zackary Drucker)
There is a bit in Zackary Drucker’s Enigma where the director off-camera exclaims “Amanda…!” to one of Amanda Lear’s answers in such an incredulous tone and it honestly made me laugh. Partly because it surprised me on account of it being rare to hear a filmmaker so brazenly call out their subject to their face. But also because it reminded me of the bag ball episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race. The one where guest judge Nicole Byer sees Lala Ri walking down the runway in that awful outfit she made and cocks her head to one side as if to say, ‘gurl, are you for real?’. Like Drucker wants to go all Cher-in-Moonstruck: snap out of it!
It is, quite honestly, a very interesting dynamic. Enigma is a documentary about trans people (well, in the case of one, maybe not) made by a trans filmmaker. Drucker’s The Stroll was, I felt, one of the best films of its year that got unfortunately overshadowed by the similar Kokomo City. And The Lady and the Dale was an impressive doc series about a trans con-artist that shares some DNA with Enigma. Ostensibly a two-hander biography of two trans women whose paths veered in wildly different directions, this latest film kind of becomes far more about one of its leading duo, Amanda Lear, by default of its narrative. The Euro-disco queen (name-dropped by Tina Turner!!), artist, model and presenter who has maintained a steadfast public stance that they are a cisgender woman who is definitely not the trans cabaret performer from The Carousel bar in Paris known at the time as Peki d’Oslo. Nope. No siree, not at all. This particular narrative consumes the film somewhat to its detriment. But as I watched, it really is obviously why. Taking its title from one of Lear’s songs, it’s pretty obvious “Enigma” refers to Lear and Lear alone, which leaves the rest of its narrative somewhat unmoored.
But then, maybe Drucker knew where the interest lied. Beyond Lear’s story, Enigma is a lovely if perhaps overly respectable portrait of April Ashley that is filled with divine archival photography and video. It’s opening passages in particular sparkle, as the audience discovers the Parisian cabaret scene where transexuals (as they more crudely labelled at the time) became underground sensations. Like Carlotta and the Les Girls here in Australia (internationally more famous as the inspiration for Terence Stamp’s Bernadette in The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert), there was a mid-century fascination with this sort of taboo entertainment that stands bizarrely at odds with the more contemporary discourse that trans people have to endure. I can’t say a film just about Ashley would have been all that exciting—she very cannily crafted her image into that of a prim, overly respectable woman with extremely plum accent—but it is a bit disappointing that her achievements (of which there are many) get consumed by the are-they-or-are-they story of Lear. As if to compount the matter, the movie premiered at the 2025 Sundance under the name "April & Amanda". Despite all she has achieved, she gets ever-so sidelined here. Given what is currently happening the UK, especially, it's easy to feel she got a bit of a raw deal.
Drucker herself as off-screen interviewer gets brought into her own film much more than you would normally see of a filmmaker. The aforementioned ‘gurl, are you for real?’ moment, obviously, but increasingly so as Lear’s evasive, obfuscating answers (at one point seemingly forgetting her own name) become harder and harder to go unchallenged. It culminates in a sequence that some have labelled as bullying and mean-spirited. It’s nobody’s business what she was or was not—she identifies as a woman and that should be it. But we all know that will never just be it when it comes to somebody like her. She was the Roxy Music girl! Can we forgive one filmmaker and not another just because they are transgender themselves? Or because the movie is good?
It's hardly surprising that Lear herself has come out against the film. But then she did agree to do the film so you have to ask yourself why she would. Surely, she knew what was going to happen? Maybe she didn’t and it was all a big surprise, but that just doesn’t sound credible. Drucker is an openly transgender filmmaker and the question of Lear's history has dogged her since the moment she found fame. As a performer, she has stoked those rumours and inuendos with song lyrics that actively ask the question just as plainly as Enigma's director has. Shown here, Lear has the vibe of a Marianne Faithfull type, husky-voiced and enjoying a second (or third? or fourth? who can keep up?) wind as a stage actor, knowingly surrounded by her paintings despite the film having just about zero interest in them. She was a longtime muse for Salvador Dali (Lear was played by openly trans actor Andreja Pejić in Mary Harron’s 2022 feature Daliland), but it’s not all that interested in that either beyond the salacious element of Dali’s noted predilections. If, as Drucker has suggest, this documentary comes from “a place of reverence and love”, then it might have been nice to actually delve into Lear’s life beyond the scandal (and April Ashley’s too, for that matter).
When all is said and done, Enigma does come across as a bit of muckraking. Which is (maybe) actually fine with me, but it is questionable in how it goes about it. Are the movie’s maker’s trying to trick Lear into something she clearly does not want to do (or, in all fairness, may not actually be accurate—that’s probably best left to one’s own reading of the material laid out in front of them). Morally, I don’t know if Drucker’s film holds up. But similar in some ways to Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato’s RuPaul-narrated The Eyes of Tammy Faye, Enigma has a certain cheaply lurid entertaining quality to it. And like Chase Joynt’s similarly divisive Framing Agnes, I appreciated a film that seemed interested in being a bit like a ‘90s queer holdover than the sort of glossy, overly polite biography that we get more often than not these days. Whether that works for you is, well, up to you. If Amanda Lear’s opinion has any sway in the matter then Enigma is "a pathetic piece of trash". And that may be the case. But I think I found it to be an oft-riveting piece of trash. And therein lies a very big difference. Amanda Lear herself says that celebrity is acting. Give the people what they expect! Whether that excuses Enigma, I can’t say. But I do know that I now absolutely must revisit her back catalogue of strange pop music.
