Elvis & Madonna

There aren’t very many movies with transgender protagonists. Fewer still with trans WLW. As such, I was ready to grade Elvis and Madonna on a curve and went into it with a lot of good will. Sadly, while the core romance is actually quite good, the movie overall just isn’t strong enough.

Elvis & Madonna is a Brazilian film that focuses on the love affair between transgender Madona and Elveria, a butch lesbian who often goes by Elvis. The two initially meet when Elvis delivers Madonna a pizza. Despite some minor hesitation on Elvis’s part because she’s never been with a trans woman, their relationship gets serious pretty quickly. However, troubles arise due to money problems, Madonna’s connections to sketchy criminals and the fact that Elvis gets pregnant.

The main positive to Elvis & Madonna is that the love story is quite sweet. Right off the bat, Elvis is overtly flirty and charming with Madonna. While there is one scene where Elvis says her hesitation with the relationship is that Madonna is trans, that kind of comes out of nowhere. Previous scenes show them having adorable pseudo-dates with no hesitation on Elvis’s part. Generally, Elvis is quite blatantly thirsty over Madonna without reservation. When their relationship is more established, it remains largely positive. They are an odd couple but they do work well together. There is support and love in this relationship and it’s portrayed really well. Had the movie allowed them to end up together, I might have given this film a positive review because of the simple sweetness of this relationship.

The problem is that nothing in this movie outside of the relationship really works. Elvis and Madonna is billed as a romantic comedy but it’s somewhat light on actual jokes. It’s a “comedy” because it’s a way lighter take on this story than what could have been. And that doesn’t always work. There’s a lot of pretty serious, dramatic plot points in this movie. But the way they deal with those plot points is by just not focusing on them. In which case, don’t put them in at all. It often ends up feeling a little uncomfortable that there is really serious stuff happening in Madonna’s life in particular but there’s just no gravity or focus given to that.

I’m not exactly qualified to talk about trans representation as a cis person but I’m going to do it anyway. For starters, Madonna is played by a cis man which is not ideal. Beyond that, it just seems like a really surface-level portrayal of a trans person. While there’s benefits in not having any trans-specific issues be the forefront of Madonna’s story, it also did feel like the filmmakers didn’t know enough about trans people. On a more basic character level, Madonna’s portrayal is iffy. She’s often portrayed as rather pathetic and somewhat pitiable. She is not a “strong transgender character”, whatever that means but a dramatic, aging woman who’s often portrayed in a way that’s supposed to garner pity from the audience when all she’s really doing is existing. It is sometimes difficult to see what Elvis sees in her because Madonna has so few positive traits.

I could forgive many of this movie’s sins if it had a happy ending. But it doesn’t. Elvis and Madonna ultimately don’t end up together. While it makes narrative sense for them to break up, I wanted to see a love conquers all narrative. This movie is clearly marketed as a romantic comedy so it’s disappointing to see it end with a breakup. Because it ends on a down note, I can’t even champion this film as a movie that allows a trans character a happy ending. I mean, I guess she doesn’t die at least. There are positives to Elvis & Madonna but even those positives come out of a place of there just not being enough trans narratives so I’ll take what I can get. Even with that curve though, Elvis & Madonna isn’t a great movie, unfortunately.

Overall rating: 5.4/10

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