This is
a movie I’ve always found interesting.
Unfortunately, though, I’ve also always found it to be less than it
could have been. There’s a lot of potential
here, but the film on a whole doesn’t manage to come together. In my view, that’s chiefly down to the
depiction of its leading lady.
Kitten
Braden is a young transwoman growing up in Ireland in the 1970s. Imaginative, ribald Kitten was a foundling,
and she divides her time mainly between scandalizing the people of her small
parish and dreaming about her birth mother.
Eventually, the latter takes precedent and, armed with the scant lead that
her mom went to London years ago, Kitten embarks on a journey to find the
family she’s been missing. Along the
way, she meets all sorts of scruffy misfits, falls in and out of love, gets in lots
of trouble, and makes the transphobes squirm.
I love
the story. Rather than being about a
transwoman, in the end, it’s about a woman, who’s trans, searching for her
mother. It takes its time and goes on
plenty of detours, and Kitten’s gender identity is always a big part of the proceedings,
but the core of the story is Kitten’s search.
It’s part whirlwind coming-of-age, part meandering mystery, part
outrageous comedy, and it’s all set against the backdrop of political unrest from
the Troubles spilling down into Ireland and reaching all the way to London. There’s so much going on here, which, in my
experience, is almost ludicrously rare in trans-related media made by cis
people.
Not to
mention the topnotch supporting cast.
From Ireland and Northern Ireland, there’s Liam Neeson, Ruth Negga
(Raina on Agents of SHIELD,) Stephen
Rea, Brendon Gleeson (MadEye Moody!), and the wonderful Liam Cunningham. And then, just for an extra treat, we also
get Dominic Cooper (young Howard Stark and former History Boy) and Ian Hart (another
Harry Potter alum, though he doesn’t
share any films with Gleeson – he played Professor Quirrell.)
Where,
for me, the film unfortunately lets its unique narrative down, is in Cillian
Murphy’s performance as Kitten. I like
Murphy, but he doesn’t work for me here, and worse still, it’s all at the
surface level. I can’t even get into
whether or not he does justice to Kitten’s provocativeness or emotional journey,
because I’m so distracted by his breathy, affected voice and campy screen
presence. In his hands, Kitten doesn’t
feel like a woman – she feels like someone playing at being a woman. If nothing else, it would be exhausting for her
to act so unnaturally all the time, and given that this is her life, not a pantomime, it seems
disrespectful to her experiences. And
honestly, if the film had done something with it, there may have been a story in Murphy’s portrayal. One could argue that Kitten, probably feeling
very alone as a transgirl in a small, conservative parish, tries to assert her
identity by behaving how she thinks a woman is meant to act instead of just being herself. She seems to have used the artificial sexpots
from old movies as a template, which obviously isn’t going to help. There could have been a thread of Kitten realizing
she can settle into her gender and doesn’t have to put on a show of it, but the
movie doesn’t seem to view the performance as forced or problematic. And that’s where it loses me.
Warnings
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