There are artists who play roles, and then there are those whose entire existence is a performance of resilience, defiance, and beauty. Guilda: Elle est bien dans ma peau, Julien Cadieux’s 2014 documentary, is an evocative, shimmering tribute to Jean Guida de Mortellaro, better known by the singular name Guilda. In its sweeping emotional scope and elegant visual storytelling, the film does far more than chart the life of a drag performer. It captures the breath of an era, the soul of a city, and the spellbinding artistry of a man who made illusion into a radical act of truth.
Born in Paris on June 21, 1924, Guilda’s beginnings already seemed bathed in the theatrical. Claiming noble descent from a Sicilian countess, he grew up with a love of spectacle and survival woven into his very fabric. By the time he arrived in Montreal in 1955, he was already a legend in the making, bringing with him the savoir-faire of postwar Parisian cabaret and the daring flamboyance that North American stages had yet to fully grasp. Guilda didn’t just perform drag, he transformed it into an art of elegance, wit, and grace. With glittered eyes and impossibly sculpted wigs, he wasn’t just impersonating women. He was revealing, with great irony and finesse, the absurdity and beauty of gender itself. In Guilda: Elle est bien dans ma peau, Cadieux pieces together a mosaic of memories, archival footage, family anecdotes, and dramatic re-enactments to breathe life into a character who was never still. The documentary is neither linear biography nor mere fan homage, it is a rich, theatrical meditation on performance, aging, and authenticity. Guilda emerges as a kaleidoscope of roles: transvestite extraordinaire, survivor of World War II atrocities, cabaret star, doting father, painter of religious icons, and Montreal’s beloved gender illusionist.
What elevates the documentary is its refusal to simplify Guilda into a single narrative. Through his own writings, particularly the moving Guilda: Il était une fois (2009), as well as interviews with his children, colleagues, and those enchanted by him, a more complex picture emerges. Guilda was not only the shimmering diva with a boa and a biting one-liner. He was also a war survivor, a bisexual man navigating love and fatherhood, and an artist continuously seeking reinvention. One of the most chilling sequences in the film is the recounting of Guilda’s escape from deportation to the Buchenwald concentration camp. Caught by the Gestapo in Nice along with two Jewish friends, he fled through a train toilet’s waste reservoir, narrowly escaping death. That traumatic experience, hauntingly remembered in his autobiography, provides a jarring counterpoint to his later flamboyant stage persona. The glamour, the laughter, the mimicry, it was never frivolous. It was resistance in rhinestones.
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The documentary is as much about the world that surrounded Guilda as it is about Guilda himself. Viewers are swept into the golden years of Montreal’s cabaret culture, a bustling nightlife that once rivaled Paris and New York. From the roaring ovations at Chez Paree to the velvet interiors of Chez Guilda, Cadieux restores these vanished spaces with love and longing. And woven into all of this is the unspoken narrative of Quebec’s sexual and cultural awakening. At a time when conservative norms ruled public life, Guilda dared to bring illusion, sensuality, and queer identity into the spotlight.
More than just recounting a career, Guilda: Elle est bien dans ma peau celebrates the emotional complexity of aging queer icons. Guilda's final years, spent painting, writing, and performing occasional shows, are shown not as a melancholy winding down, but as a continued evolution. In one of the film’s most touching moments, we see Guilda at 80, returning to the stage in 2004, still radiating theatrical joy. Though his movements are slower, his wit remains razor-sharp, and his eyes still sparkle with that mischievous, knowing glint.
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Throughout the documentary, there’s an unrelenting tenderness. Cadieux treats his subject with reverence, but never blind adoration. He embraces Guilda’s contradictions: his self-mythologizing, his complex relationships, and his undeniable magnetism. Guilda’s relationship with his children, especially his daughter, who narrates parts of the film, is portrayed with honesty and warmth. This familial intimacy adds an unexpected emotional layer. Guilda, who spent much of his life embodying fantasy onstage, was offstage a loving, flawed, and deeply human father. His parenting didn’t always follow convention, but it overflowed with affection.
As a portrait of Jean Guilda, the film is mesmerizing. As a tribute to an entire cultural epoch, it is indispensable. The cabarets, the makeup kits, the feathered fans, they are all memorialized with cinematic poetry. Cadieux infuses each frame with a sense of loss and celebration. We are reminded that the passage of time does not dull the impact of radical beauty, it only makes it more precious.
Guilda: Elle est bien dans ma peau is not just a film for fans of drag, LGBTQ+ history, or theatrical lore. It is a cinematic meditation on how one person, by daring to be fully themselves in a world that demanded conformity, can reshape the artistic and moral landscape of a society. Jean Guilda, comedian, cabaret legend, gender illusionist, war survivor, father, and painter, was many things. But above all, as the film quietly insists, he was an artist. And what an artist he was.
In the end, Cadieux’s documentary doesn’t just preserve Guilda’s legacy, it invites us to live more vividly, to embrace our contradictions, to perform our truths unapologetically. In that sense, Guilda still takes the stage, more alive than ever.
Image credits: YouTube
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Jean Guilda - Il était une fois ... Guilda
Jean Guilda - Guilda: elle et moi
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