You wish you loved a film like “Fuchsia Libre”, a heartwarming, LGBTQ+-themed sports dramedy from the Philippines. Its heart is certainly in the right place, and one would have hoped its screenplay also was. Unfortunately, little really works in a film that tends to forget it is a gay-themed film about wrestling and gives too much importance to a meaningless gangster storyline that has absolutely no point or added value.
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Oliver is a young gay man whose father is a supremely heteronormative, traditional patriarch who repudiated him many years ago because of his sexuality. The heart of the story is a father-and-son melodrama of reconciliation by way of wrestling, as Oliver needs to prove to his dad he is a tough man too – just not exactly the type his father expected. If only the film had stuck to that theme.
The problem is that the writers also felt the need to introduce a crime storyline that has little to do here. Oliver owns an LGBT-friendly gym, which is threatened with foreclosure. To save it, he decides to join an underground wrestling competition run by a bloodthirsty crime boss and soon gets entangled with the gangsters and their violent machinations.
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From that point on, the story makes little sense. It is never clear why mobsters run this place (we never see any gambling or money changing hands), and they do not even seem to have a particular plan. Their boss, aptly named Patron (Khalil Ramos, who is visibly getting a kick out of playing an unhinged crime boss), spends most of his screen time watching the matches and laughing maniacally. You are required not to ask more of him or the story.
The film tries to link up the father-and-son drama with this vague crime plot by having the dad infiltrate the games as an undercover cop. Except that everyone knows he is a cop, without this apparently being an issue. What the gangsters expect from him is never made clear, but this is one of many questions you are not supposed to ask. Just enjoy the fights.
Unfortunately, said fights are not particularly spectacular. The title seemed to indicate that the Mexican-born, highly theatrical form of wrestling known as lucha libre would be central to the narrative, but the short fights feel more like afterthoughts which last a couple of minutes at most. At the same time, the film has strictly nothing to say about wrestling, or the idea of having to fight to assert one’s identity.
Worse, the fact that Oliver decided to make fuchsia the dominant color of his fighting suit seemed to promise some kind of satire of gender stereotypes and the hyper-masculinity of wrestling – and combat sports more generally. Yet the writers seem to have forgotten about that aspect of the story, and you would be hard-pressed to find any such commentary or, in fact, any kind of depth in the film.
That kind of thematic ambition is instead to be found in another (excellent) gay-themed wrestling film, “Cassandro”, based on a very similar story and released in 2023. “Fuchsia Libre”, which may have been influenced by that earlier film, feels like its dumbed down, telenovela version. That film had a lot to say about wrestling as a sport and a lifestyle, whereas “Fuchsia Libre” does not even properly address its initial theme of homosexuality in a patriarchal society.
Visually, the film certainly has the production values of a made-for-television movie (it was released in theaters in the Philippines), with a maximum of 15 extras playing the tepid audience of the wrestling matches in most scenes. RC Delos Reyes may be a talented director (he has no less than four films listed for 2024 alone), but “Fuchsia Libre” is not a good opportunity for his talent to shine. This is a shame as the cast is otherwise pretty solid, starting with the always excellent John Arcilla as the gruff father.
“Fuchsia Libre” is a good example of a movie that does not know what kind of film it wants to be and swings wildly from one genre to another, and from one tone to another. It is also the type of film that replaces thoughtfulness with sentimentality, doing a serious disservice to a story and a sport with otherwise great potential. This was recently proved by the TV series “The Queen of Villains“, also on Netflix, which has the kind of charm, wit and substance sorely lacking from “Fuchsia Libre”. You wish it had been half as ambitious.
