TOMBOY (2011)
Director: Céline Sciamma
Cinematographer: Crystel Fournier
A cute French melodrama about a little girl unsure about her gender, so uses the opportunity of moving into a new area to reinvent herself as a boy. Whether she convinces anyone or not is open to interpretation, but she does capture the heart of a local girl in the process.
While generally very sensitive with its subject, the film loses me towards the end when Laure/Mickael’s initially-sweet mother goes batshit-crazy after finding out what her daughter has been up to. The sequence where mother drags child door-to-door to apologise for just being herself, humiliating her in the process, just doesn’t make any sense to me whatsoever.
No human would react this way, and the parents she encounters during her psychotic outburst would, in reality, tell her to be more understanding to her daughter and let it go.
Classic post-2000 illogical writing.
The film also has the girl actually answering the question about whether she’s a boy or girl at the end, rather than just having her lost in thought and cutting to black. It would’ve gotten a standing ovation and an extra star rating from critics if it’d done this, but hey-ho.
The tone of the film is generally very naturalistic and documentary-style, which I do enjoy, but it does have time for plenty of beauty shots, such as the one above.
A soon-to-be classic in the LGBT genre, with the fabulous Zoé Héran’s perpetually-sullen tomboy being a striking and memorable image.
Do stay in touch, darlings.
Toodles!
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