Movies in Brief: 'The Amazing Truth About Queen Raquela'

Much as its subject — a 20-something Filipino pre-op transsexual named Earvin who rechristens him/herself Raquela — this curious film is never quite here or there. The Icelandic director Olaf de Fleur Johannesson discovered Raquela working the streets in an impoverished sector of Cebu City, Philippines, and decided he had the basis for a fascinating documentary. But he lacked the budget to shoot a proper feature.

Instead, Mr. Johannesson created a hybrid. Though it is filmed with an intimate and voyeuristic camera that captures the charismatic (and extremely verbose) Raquela in nearly every scene, the movie, which opens Friday at Quad Cinemas, is built on re-stagings of actual events, narrative inventions, and scenes in which nonprofessional actors play characters who may or may not have actually existed in Raquela's life.

Some directors, notably Austria's astonishing Ulrich Seidl, manage to blur the lines between fact and fiction so persuasively that they call into question the very nature of "fact" and "fiction," provoking an epistemological inquiry even as they serve as a kind of cinematic anthropology. Much as I want to indulge the subcultural funk that "Raquela" embraces, it is difficult to see Mr. Johannesson's choice as more than a hedge.

The story comes with its own inherent emotional arc. Raquela dreams of meeting a foreign Prince Charming who will sweep her away from a dangerous life of prostitution. Instead, she ends up cleaning fish in a factory in Iceland, having befriended the one Filipino ladyboy she can find.

Were this an actual documentary, it would truly be "amazing." Unfortunately, it plays more like one of those creatively enhanced "memoirs" that beg the audience's sympathy with fingers crossed behind the back. That doesn't invalidate Raquela's merit as a character, even if the film drags an awful lot for its brief running time of 80 minutes, but the filmmaking craft never rises to the occasion.