The five-part Netflix series tells the story of a female wrestler in the 1980s who might have gone a little too deep into character.
Dump Matsumoto was a reviled — and thus beloved — heel in the All Japan Women’s Pro-Wrestling league in the 1980s. “The Queen of the Villains” (on Netflix, in Japanese with subtitles, or dubbed) is a colorful five-part scripted drama based loosely on her young life and early career, and it traces both her rise and the increasing popularity of women’s pro wrestling in Japan at the time.
The show lands more as a boppy superhero origin story than as an earnest biopic: It is at times bright and exaggerated, a tidy tale about messy people and an absolute bonanza of retro tracksuits. Yuriyan Retriever stars as Dump, though for much of the show she is simply Kaoru, a young woman with nowhere to put all her anger and ambition. Her father is an abusive drunk who drifts in and out of her life, stealing from her mother and belittling her and her younger sister. As a tween, she learns that her father has a secret other family — including another daughter also named Kaoru. It’s enough to make a good girl go bad.
Our Kaoru falls in love with wrestling, with being encouraged to be strong, tough and violent. A grim determination to simply keep going is as powerful as any suplex, and the ring is one of few places where being a larger woman is an asset.
But it isn’t always easy for Kaoru to keep track of what’s real and what’s just for show, and as she dissolves into her Dump persona, some other wrestlers recoil. It’s all a fun sisterhood until Dump brings a chain into the ring and starts choking people. And few friendships survive repeated stabbings in the scalp with a fork.
“Queen” itself reflects Dump’s ambiguous realities. We’re never sure how cranked up the artifice of it all is, how much of a match is choreographed, the degree to which the wrestlers agree on what is fake. Dump wrestles in a few “hair matches,” in which the winner cuts the loser’s hair, but she also holds a colleague down and shaves her hair outside the ring, at their dorm. Inept, indifferent management leaves the wrestlers to establish standards on their own. But they don’t always agree on what’s safe and acceptable, or on whose star-making moves should get priority.
Appropriately for a show about pro wrestling, “Queen” feels both illicit and wholesome. Retriever’s performance captures Kaoru’s innocence and ferocity — the turmoil of being proud of and afraid of what’s inside you.
Source: Television - nytimes.com
