theglobeandmail.com – Rick Groen – From Friday’s Globe and Mail
Consider the opening frame: close-up of a young soldier in fatigues painting his face with camouflage. Now factor in the title, To Die Like a Man, and this would seem to be a war film. Well, it isn’t, at least not the conventional kind.
Minutes later, with typical brazenness, Portuguese director Joao Pedro Rodrigues switches genres and mixes genders. That callow soldier gives way to an aging drag queen with her own war paint, in her own battle dress, and having lived life in a perpetual no man’s land, suffering from her own battle fatigue…