The historical biopic is a cinematic genre defined more by its pitfalls than its merits, laden as these films can be with historical revisionism, unintended anachronism, and predictable plot beats. Perhaps most insidiously, films that purport to tell the “true story” of deceased individuals’ lives risk flattening complex and contradictory individuals into two-dimensional symbols of triumph or tragedy. These artistic and ethical traps are amplified when a film aims to depict marginalized peoples; our reflexive condescension toward the past can blend noxiously with a prurient gaze on the suffering of the oppressed.
In her film Two Times João Liberada, director Paula Tomás Marques critiques these tendencies to warp historical figures for contemporary cinematic entertainment. The film follows the production of a Portuguese historical drama about João Liberada, a (fictional) gender-nonconforming target of the Spanish Inquisition, from the perspective of the film’s leading actress, a transgender woman named João (June João). João clashes with the director (André Tecedeiro), a cisgender man whose interest in Liberada lies exclusively in the suffering she endures, while João is more interested in the moments of hope, resilience, and human connection Liberada may have found amidst strife. As the film’s troubled production progresses, signs begin to emerge that the spirit of Liberada herself may be interfering with the attempt to represent her life onscreen.
Marques gives her film a loose narrative structure, which follows the slowly escalating conflict between João and director Diogo as João’s doubts about the film grow, and culminates in an act of supernatural intervention. The plot, though, functions mainly as a vehicle for Marques and June João — who co-wrote the screenplay in addition to starring in the film — to assay the implications of depicting long-dead queer and trans people, necessarily without their consent, from a 21st-century perspective. The critique largely focuses on the cisgender director’s usage of both Liberada and João as props for his own voyeuristic artistic project, with one particularly cutting scene of Diogo repeatedly demanding that João stay underwater longer as she rehearses a drowning scene, barely letting her come up for air; but João’s own role in presenting a skewed narrative also comes under critique. Musing on the possibility of her own image being manipulated after her death, as she has done to Liberada, João muses in voiceover in the film’s final scene: “I also hope to be a ghost haunting you all.”
While Marques’ narrative approach is multilayered, her aesthetic approach is spare, though frequently striking. The 16mm photography, shot by Mafalda Fresco, is textured and appealing, with simple techniques — double exposure to create ghosts in the frame, for instance — deployed to pleasingly uncanny effect. Where the film falters, however, is in narrative propulsion and emotional involvement: with the story and characterizations acting as more of a vehicle for ideas, Marques does not provide much room for engagement beyond the aesthetic or the intellectual, which is problematic insofar as that the film does seem to ask us to invest in João’s conflicted, emotionally challenging experience on set. The performance style of the entire cast, too, is cerebral and reserved, again encouraging intellectual engagement over emotional identification. Two Times João Liberada, then, is mostly effective as a thought experiment, though one that is at least an inventive and generative one, raising pertinent questions about the complications of representing real lives in fictional mediums, within its own clever metafictional frame.
Published as part of New Directors/New Films 2025.
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