‘Enigma’ Review: A Fascinating Portrait of Two Trailblazing Transgender Legends
Murtada Elfadl With “Enigma,” director Zachary Drucker (“The Stroll”) makes another intriguing film about trans history. From the sidewalks of New York, this time she takes the audience to glamourous Parisiannightclubs and the fringes of British aristocracy to tell the story of Amanda Lear and April Ashley.
The film is a straightforward chronological documentary relying on archival footage and media interviews from that era. Most fascinating is Drucker’s interview with Lear, which gives “Enigma” much-needed tension and conflict to balance out the conventionality of the rest of the proceedings.
Dubbed the “white queen of disco,” Lear was a famous performer and celebrity in the 1970s, while Ashley started as a model and became a pioneer of trans rights advocacy in her native Britain.
According to Ashley, on whose book and recollections most of the film is constructed, they met as showgirls in the late 1950s in the Parisian cabaret Le Carrousel.
