"Better a fallen rocket than never a burst of light."
~ Tom Stoppard, The Invention of Love

Thursday, July 28, 2016

Ma vie en rose (1997, R)

This Belgian film has been in my “so many movies, so little time” pile for years, and I finally got around to it.  It hits a lot of the typical hallmarks of trans stories, but I think it mostly hits them well and does a nice job exploring its subject matter while also telling a compelling story.

The Fabres have just moved into town, and with their new neighbors peering in, parents Pierre and Hanna are still deciding what should be done about their youngest child, Ludovic.  Hanna insists that Ludovic’s penchant for wearing dresses and playing with dolls is “normal” until age seven and assures Pierre that “he’ll outgrow it” soon.  Pierre, meanwhile, either doesn’t trust that the “problem” will go away on its own or doesn’t want to wait for it to do so, and urges more proactive measures.  What neither of them realize, of course, is that Ludovic is transgender, and despite their worrying and speculating, her only real problem is people policing her gender and telling her she’s something she’s not.

Many of the story beats are what you’d expect.  We get dress-up sessions, arguments over Ludovic’s hair, bullying at school, child psychologists, neighbors making their disapproval clear, punishments over Ludovic being herself, tense dinner-table shouting matches, worried looks over Ludovic’s elegant dancing, and parents at school getting up in arms over Ludovic’s “unnatural tendencies.”  In spite of all that well-trod ground, however, there’s a good story here that feels specific to the characters at hand.

I really enjoy Ludovic, who’s daydreamy and a little shy, young enough that she really doesn’t get what all the drama is about.  She accepts that she may currently have the body of a boy but knows that that isn’t right and fully expects the situation to remedy itself soon.  While she waits to become a girl, she cheerfully plans her wedding to her schoolyard crush, and when her older sister explains biological gender to her, it doesn’t faze her in the slightest.  In fact, she sees it as an explanation to all the confusion, and she begins reassuring people that one of her X’s (as in XX, not XY) got lost when God was making her.  It’s not until kids at school make fun of her dolls and her parents start yelling at her for wearing dresses that she starts to get confused herself, not understanding how she’s expected to be a boy when she’s so obviously a girl.

I think that, overall, Ludovic’s parents and grandmother are handled fairly well.  Even though the spectrum of acceptance to resistance seems range generally from Hanna to Granny to Pierre, their positions aren’t fixed and there’s no clear “good guy” or “bad guy” here.  All three adults have their moments of understanding and gentleness, and all three give in at times to their own confusion and anger.  They try to “straighten Ludovic out” and take her to task for her gender expression in private, but they also rally protectively around her when people in the neighborhood sneer at her.  I’m especially interested in Hanna, whose caring empathy is built on a slightly unstable foundation, and whose acceptance of Ludovic is continually couched in excuses – as if she loves her “son” the way “he” is, but she’s simultaneously reassuring herself that it’s not what it looks like.  Really interesting dynamic there.

Warnings

Language, sexual references, drinking/smoking, brief violence, and thematic elements.

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