Tomboy (2011)

A movie that could never have been made in North America, because it involves a little girl-body that is sometimes naked in the bath. The title is intentionally ambiguous - is Mikael/Laure a tomboy, accidentally stumbling into summer-vacation freedom from gendered social conformity at the age cusp when that bugaboo really starts making itself felt? A baby lesbian? A transsexual? (What pronoun should I use in this review?) Most people would argue trans, I suspect, but the filmmaker’s mode is observational and non-reductive; that of the children she watches, exploratory. There’s a power in the scene where Mikael takes off hir shirt to play football that cis women will grok - a differential there, no matter what, and being a girl who is “good enough to play ball” with the boys only points up the unbridgeability of the gap. At the same time, Mikael-the-putative-boy is sensitive, “different” from the others, prefers the sidelines and the company of women. Lisa is a Wendy Darling, the one girl running with a pack of boys at an age where that makes you slightly superior and mysterious, but the first thing she does when she gets a boyfriend is put makeup on him. (“It looks nice on you,” says the mother, but not with concealed relief; Laure’s tomboyishness is a non-issue; it’s not a family where there’s only one way to be a girl. Emphasis: to be a girl.) As for the pertly adorable little sister, she’s more than just happy to have a big sister who can be a big brother when the occasion requires. There’s a delight in her that’s half putting one over on the grownups, half the discovery that one of the world’s physical rules simply is not. That it’s merely a matter of perspective, like Douglas Adams’ trick to flying.

All of which is to say, I have rarely been more upset by a movie than when the four-year-old’s revealed truth ran up against the world at large, as it inevitably did. More upset than the ending was meant to leave the viewer; upset enough that I had to hold back on a review until I could articulate what got to me so viscerally, as a cis woman who can’t really own the issue. I think, now, that it was the systemic loss of possibility. Bullying and peer pressure are bad; one’s gut reactions as parents don’t always do one credit. But the worst of all is that summer vacation has to end, and when everyone goes back to school you have to put one name down in the government register, and one letter - M or F. Because that is inarguable; that is the fundamental so-called wisdom underlying pre-teens’ knowledge of what is obviously “gross” or not. And it contravenes my fundamental sense of what life is about, which is to become, not to be. Discover who you really are, or become someone you’re not; try, pretend, discard, whatever. Practice. Make a mockery of it. And have the right to disregard, if you want, the doors that labels open as well as those that they close. Untenable idealism, yeah, of course: I can’t “try” not being Asian. But that’s the instinct I have nevertheless. I made an attempt, once, to introduce “Other” as a drop-down menu choice on web sites, expecting to be shot down because - God forbid - it would mess up the marketing research data. What I got was scorn and utter incomprehension. “What, like for people who don’t know their gender? How can anyone not know?” (This from an accessibility advocate, by the by.) Well, and so what if someone doesn’t know? Or doesn’t care to identify? Does that make hir a cretin or a liar? Somewhere between age 4 and 14 we lose the trick of flying; however problematic Barrie may be, he got that one right.