This is like watching a Jean Genet novel translated into Portuguese and relocated to Brazil, circa 1930. All the characters are present: thieves and whores, drag queens and murders, love and hate. Lázaro Ramos, as Madame Satã, gives a wonderful performance that gives real meaning to the word `fierce';a complicated man whose only possible response to a world that hates him is to rage against it. And what rage! And what love! The family he pieces together, as wounded and damaged as he is, provides the only constant in a life that poverty and exile have doomed to chaos. Karim Ainouz, the director, must be congratulated on this courageous film.