Vera is an impressive first feature by Brazilian Sergio Toledo, who began his career making Super-8 documentaries at the behest of Hector Babenco (Pixote, Kiss of the Spider Woman). Like his mentor, Toledo has an obvious interest in the darker elements of human behavior. Simply stated, Vera (Ana Beatriz Nogueria) believes she is a man trapped within the body of a woman. As the film begins, she is released from the all-female orphanage where she was raised and finds herself working at a university library. Toledo alternates between scenes of Vera's upbringing at the institution and her attempts to adapt to conservative Brazilian society. In the cloistered world of the orphanage, Vera has had a fundamental revelation: if men are attracted to women and she is attracted to women, then she must be a man. Now, at the university, she is distracted by her sexy co-worker Clara (Aida Leiner), who eventually proposes a lesbian relationship, the last thing on Vera's mind. Vera is, after all, a man, donning masculine attire and parading around with all the arrogance of the most macho male. According to Toledo's film, sexual inculcation has created a schism between expectation and desire. In this abyss, Vera's body becomes a metaphor for the prison of social instruction. Outside the grim orphanage, she tries to reinvent her identity, to join desire with attainment. But in Vera, it takes more than clothes to make the man.