Like many aging luchadors, Saúl Armendáriz — better known as Cassandro el Exotico — has to begrudgingly deal with the constant pain of his body being bruised and battered on a daily basis, the nightly toll of the fame and fans his jaw-dropping flips and superhero-like leaps in the ring have brought him.
For over 25 years, Cassandro has been a world champion of Mexican wrestling and, now, an elder statesman of lucha libre, training new athletes of the sport in Mexico and Texas. But what makes Cassandro’s story all the more appealing is that he is also an out and proud gay man, something that has brought him equal parts heaven and hell.
As a Latino, I can easily admit that, especially in a sport like lucha libre, the macho blustering of many a male fan can come out in surprisingly vitriolic ways — except for in the case of Cassandro, it seems. While he’s had his problems in the past, now he’s considered an icon of the sport, a testament to Mexico’s growing “live and let live” culture, something that America could do well to learn from.
Still, in the documentary Cassandro, the Exotico!, Marie Losier’s 16 mm camera goes deep into the legend of Mexican wrestling as it plays now, a world that is nothing like the WWF spectacle of pomp and pyro that we’ve come to expect; many of the these current luchadors go through life without so much as health insurance, each local match getting them one step closer to either low-rent obscurity or forced retirement.
Losier goes beyond the typical fandom and, instead, takes us into Cassandro’s surprising life, where one minute he’s the uncle we all wish we had and the next a powerhouse of pulverizing agility in the ring. And even though the film does end on a bittersweet note with Cassandro losing his lush mane in his most recent fight, he’s always an upbeat character it’s impossible not to cheer for. —Louis Fowler