Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Enigma’ on HBO Max, a Riveting Dual Portrait of Trans Icons Amanda Lear and April Ashley

By John Serba

Even though the title of HBO Pride Month documentary Enigma (now streaming on HBO Max) ostensibly refers to Amanda Lear, it offers a biographical narrative parallel to hers: April Ashley. Lear is famous for being Europe’s “Queen of Disco,” and for denying, denying, DENYING that she used to be male. So it’s crucial that director Zackary Drucker (who helmed The Lady and the Dale and was a producer on Transparent) provides context via Ashley, a trans woman who spent decades fighting for trans rights in England. What Drucker ends up with is fascinating portraits of two people, one open in acknowledgment of their identity, the other dead-set on looking forward and maintaining some mystique – and leaves us wrestling with the notion that both points-of-view are inspiring to the trans community.

ENIGMA: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: The saddest piece of this story is, Ashley knew Lear before she visited a doctor in Morocco for what was then slyly dubbed “operation pussycat.” They sang and danced at drag cabaret-turned-trans cabaret Le Carrousel de Paris in the 1950s, when Lear was known as Peki d’Oslo. They were close friends. But things changed when Lear transitioned – she abandoned everything and everyone from her old life. “It’s a curious thing, being removed from someone else’s story,” Ashley says, adding that Lear would occasionally call her when she was feeling down and needed someone to talk to. They would remain estranged until Ashley passed away in 2021, aged 86; Ashley is represented in Enigma via extensive archival interviews. 

But Lear is still here, participating in the documentary while tending her lush garden or seated in a small gallery, surrounded by paintings. Amidst the usual documentary trappings – archival footage and stills, talking heads – and central to the film is a rather knotty conversation between Drucker and Lear. Drucker asks Lear what name she was born with. “Forgot,” she replies as every amateur lie detector within spitting distance blares like an air-raid siren. Lear says she doesn’t know who Peki is. Drucker shows Lear a series of photos of Peki, who looks female, and Lear says she isn’t that person, that she knew who the woman in the photos was but never met her. She drank too much, Lear insists. Lear also says nonsensical things like “I can’t explain myself because I’m not myself.” She doesn’t care what anyone else says, whether it’s personal anecdotes (from a number of Le Carrousel performers who turn up in the doc) or hard evidence. She has her story and she’s stuck to it for decades. Does anyone believe it, though? The way Lear speaks, I’m not convinced even she believes it.

To hear Ashley’s story, you quickly understand why Lear doggedly controls her own narrative. Ashley was born George Jamieson in Liverpool, England. “I was an ‘it,’” she says of her childhood. She was sent to the “loony bin” where she was given male hormones and shock therapy. She was the object of abuse. She attempted suicide. In her early 20s, she found her footing and an accepting, loving adoptive family at Le Carrousel, and underwent gender reassignment surgery. She became a famous fashion model. She got married, and when it hit the rocks, her husband outed her as trans, prompting every agency and endorsement to drop her. She was blackballed. The divorce-court judge ordered a grotesque top-to-bottom physical analysis of her, then declared her to be a man. She became a trans activist, and appeared on multiple TV talk shows, where her interviewers asked her intrusive questions rooted in ignorance and/or prejudice. But she eventually successfully helped lobby for the British government to pass the Gender Recognition Act in the early 2000s.

Lear, meanwhile, pretty much says she doesn’t remember anything about her life prior to meeting famous surrealist painter Salvador Dali in the 1960s. She worked as a model, famous for the cover of Roxy Music’s For Your Pleasure album. Her entry in the music business eventually landed her a recording contract despite her self-admitted lack of singing ability – and yet she sold millions of records in the ’70s and ’80s as a disco contemporary of Donna Summer and Grace Jones. The more famous she got, the more a predatory press dug into her past, asking questions about her gender. She claims she never said definitively whether she was born male or female, essentially as a PR stunt – and she maintains her coy demeanor and consistently dodges the question to this very day. Her interviews with Drucker are unconvincing, riddled with inconsistencies and contradictions. But she never suffered in the public eye like Ashley did.

Amanda Lear in Enigma Photo: HBO Max

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: I haven’t seen a celeb interview this prickly since Faye. Also, Drucker helmed Framing Agnes, a documentary study of trans histories, and was an interviewee in Netflix doc Disclosure: Trans Lives on Screen. 

Performance Worth Watching: One could easily assert that Lear is putting on more of a “performance” here, but she and Ashley are equally crucial to Drucker’s thesis.

Memorable Dialogue: Ashley describes her mental and physical state, pre-transition: “My mind was completely that of a woman, and my body was also that of a woman. Except for this petite inconvenience.”

Sex and Skin: A handful of nudie archival photos and clips.

Our Take: In an age of celeb-puff-piece documentaries, it’s rare to see such tension between interviewer and subject. Not that Drucker and Lear’s interactions are necessarily testy – the filmmaker is warm but direct in her questioning, and genuine in her affection, and Lear, well, she’s answered these kinds of questions for decades. Despite that, Lear isn’t particularly convincing, and it’s difficult to ascertain whether she’s delusional and believing her own fabrications, or fully aware of what she’s doing. Per my interpretation, it’s slightly more of the latter, and her unwillingness to define herself in black-and-white terms is reflective of the fluidity of gender.

Enigma builds to a scintillating conversation between Drucker and Lear, where the director, herself a trans woman, delivers a deeply sincere speech about how Lear, regardless of her claims, is absolutely an inspiration to the trans community. Drucker doesn’t pry into Lear as much as she tries to explain what doors might open if Lear told the truth. And we’re left to wrangle with the notion that lying is sometimes justifiable. That being trans doesn’t imply nobility or selflessness; people are complex no matter their sexuality or gender. That every individual deserves to hold agency over their own identity. That Lear may just be protecting herself, even if it’s left her isolated. That the truth of who she is – well, frankly, that it’s none of our fucking business. And we should accept her on her own terms. Would she be lying if we lived in a just society? 

Assertions about Lear’s psychological health, I’ll leave to armchair therapists. Or, better yet, leave it alone – again, it’s not our business. Drucker’s decision to essentially compare and contrast Lear and Ashley’s stories is a wise move; her initial contextualization of their stories via some history of Le Carrousel pulls the film’s focus a bit, and it initially struggles to find its footing. But the film is nevertheless well-informed, deeply considered and insightful, an analysis of identities within identities, two utterly fascinating and culturally potent portraits of progress and survival. 

Our Call: Enigma is an early contender for 2025’s best documentary. STREAM IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.