Enigma
(USA, 94 min.)
Dir. Zackary Drucker
“Be truthful to yourself and you will be magnificent,” says April Ashley in Enigma. “If you’re dependent on labels, you will be trash.”
Ashley is one of two women in Enigma who avoided the trash heap by remaining true to herself. This fascinating documentary by Zackary Drucker (The Stroll) crafts an appropriately enigmatic tale of trans icons, elders, erasure, and survival. It tells two different but complementary stories in the biographies of April Ashley and Amanda Lear. The film shares how the two women ran in similar circles during the 1950s and ’60s, including (allegedly) the same Parisian cabaret.
But the similarities and differences in their biographies diverge notably from that point. So too does the telling as one woman favours transparency and disclosure, while the other prefers mystery and evasion. The non-answers in Enigma, however, prove as satisfying as the answers do. If not more so. By profiling these women, Drucker brilliantly captures how no two trans experiences are the same, yet they’re united by shared truths, risks, rewards, and consequences.
Drucker admirably juggles the tricky task of affording both women equal weight and authority. The complexity comes not necessarily through Ashley’s openness and Lear’s elusiveness, but largely through the fact that one is still living and the other is not. Ashley, who died in 2021, enjoys a remarkably active voice here. The fullness of her story appears rather seamlessly thanks to a mix of archival interviews and scripted voiceover based on research into Ashley’s life and read by Rebecca Root. Lear, meanwhile, appears in new 1:1 interviews. Drucker’s audible disbelief at her non-answers proves wickedly illuminating.
Were the fates reversed and Lear no longer with us, though, Enigma would be quite a different story. Instead, Drucker refreshingly avoids speculating about either woman’s life choices. And both Ashley and Lear—especially Lear—seem content to keep the labels in the trash.
Enigma weaves between Ashley and Lear’s stories and plays them off one another where appropriate. Ashley’s biography sets the scene, perhaps by necessity. Her journey, struggles, and triumphs have more obvious documentation. Drucker draws upon extensive interviews to let Ashley convey her experience in her own words. She tells how, growing up in Liverpool, she was always made to feel like an “it.” Never comfortably identifying as male or female, she survived suicide attempts, hormone therapy, and shock treatments. Her story conveys agency stripped from a child, but reclaimed by a young adult.
Ashley remembers the cabaret scene at La Carousel, where she and other transwomen found their niche. Performing in drag, and eventually finding their true selves through that community, Ashley evokes a safe space for women at a time when men in France were banned from wearing women’s clothing outside of Carnival. But that network, Ashley shares, led her to Casablanca where she got gender-affirmation surgery for a thousand bucks.
Lear, meanwhile, insists no less than three times that she’s never been to La Carousel. Ashley and others in the film recall an artist named Peki d’Oslo, who looks like a dead ringer for Lear in old photos from the era. But Ashley and others talk about Peki and Amanda more or less interchangeably. They reflect upon Salvador Dalí’s habit for frequenting the club, his interest in trans women, and Peki’s keenness to break out into the arts scene. Ashley also notes in a mildly conspiratorial whisper that Peki too went to Casablanca for “operation pussycat.”
However, when Drucker raises the question, Lear asks, “Who’s Peki?”
“Amanda…” the director replies.
Enigma cuts to an archival newspaper clipping of Peki’s arrest. The photo, along with scant biographical details, match Lear well. Enigma presents extensive material to make the case that April and Peki are the same person.
Lear playfully shoots the question back at Drucker and tells her, “Think whatever you want. It doesn’t change my life at all.” She denies her affiliation with Dalí, too. It’s worth noting, though, that Lear’s 1:1 interview sees her seated while surrounded by paintings—and pretty gay ones at that!—that evidence an artistic persona.
However, Lear’s refusal to answer the question, or at least provide an answer that Drucker seeks, speaks perhaps to the vastly different career paths and life choices that guide Enigma’s dramatic turns. When the story cuts back to Ashley, she’s completely open about her transition. Newspaper clippings and interviews show how she never denied her reality to anyone. In doing so, though, Enigma tells how Ashley’s paid dearly for her effort to promote trans visibility. There are glamour shots of Ashley in Vogue as an underwear model, followed by a story of a career dashed and jobs cancelled after a newspaper outed her.
Her marriage to Arthur Corbett raises another outing after their short-lived union, which informed Ashley of his habit for dressing in women’s clothing, inspired a jealous rage in him. Ashley tells how her life was again dragged through the headlines as Corbett charged her with deception and the courts ruled that she wasn’t a woman. That ruling gets credit for four decades of marriage inequality.
Ask Lear about the man she married, though, and she can’t remember his name. But as Enigma charts Lear’s success as a disco diva and recording artist, she, too, tussles with the headlines. Tabloid after tabloid and interviewer after interviewer ask Lear the same question: Is she really a man? The misgendering within the query over years’ worth of archival footage illustrates the invasiveness of that request, too. People pry into her gender identity instead of talking about her work. However, her lifelong commitment to deflecting the question lets her correct the course of her career narrative. She can talk about her work—she can work at all!—because she embraces the enigma. Drucker revisits Lear’s lyrics—which seemingly celebrate androgyny, a transition, and passing—with her and uses them to ask that question again. Lear holds strong to her deflection.
Part of that stealth mode, however, includes avoiding people who know her secret, if she has one. “It’s a curious thing, being removed from someone story,” Ashley notes in her interviews. Her own biography includes an anecdote about landing a boat in Venice and seeing Lear and/or Peki on the boardwalk. She recalls waving to an old friend, who barrelled out of sight, mortified that she’d been seen even though they both allegedly had formative experiences at the same cabaret. Lear, obviously and humorously, denies the encounter.
The latter point brings Enigma to a riveting and intensely personal climax. Drucker professes that she credits Lear as inspiration in her own journey as a transwoman. Lear, however, remains un-phased while hearing that transpeople saw in her the courage to chart their paths. Drucker pushes back just as confidently as the interviewers in ’70s’ and ’80s’ interviews do, but there’s a respectful caution. The director recognizes that she has a right to ask the question, but Lear has every right not to answer it.
While Drucker prods Lear to come out as trans, she also gives her permission to keep mum, recognizing that there’s a price to that silence, too. “Pioneers seldom understand the paths they’ve blazed,” Drucker notes towards the film’s end. By the final act, Ashley gets her due as a trailblazer who helped pioneer trans rights in the U.K. Meanwhile, Lear can claim a similar honour with this appreciative tribute. All the pieces are in place if she chooses to complete the story that honours the multiplicity of trans experiences. Lear remains playfully evasive to the end. Her playful, enigmatic silence facilitates one of the most richly complex character studies in recent memory.
