This is a very charming work.It can be viewed as a Chinese Box of unfolding,gender-bending images;a nostalgic"cri-de-coeur" for a world that really only existed on sound stages and photographers' cameras.And,evidently-insistently,passionately-in Alexis del Lago's mind.Alexis great talent was always the Presentation of Self or the the Illusion of self.It is as if Norma Desmond had never left.Celluliod burns very fast,as Quentin Tarantino showed us in "Inglorious Basterds".But the hot-house oxygen of those days is once again given a chance here.Were Garbo,Dietrich et al any more real?Were all the great faces on screen just magic lantern simulacra? Besides its enormous appeal to the art house audience,"Caprice" could(and should) be included in the Identity and Gender Fluidity lectures of any Queer Studies curriculum.It is ready to be seen.
