really great, complex, and thoughtful movie about an intersex kid who, although not reassigned at birth, has been raised as a girl and given appropriate medication to develop as such. am not sure about the biological accuracy — at 15, alex has small but nonetheless existing breasts, a high-pitch, definitely feminine voice, and looks most certainly like a girl — but the issues this small film (from the film movement) raises are doubtlessly rich and, it seems to me, as true to reality as fiction can make them.
alex’s parents have chosen to let alex keep her ambiguous genitals, so that she is now endowed with both kinds (the film, thankfully, doesn’t delve into lurid details, but there is a penis and almost certainly a vagina). to escape the curiosity of the world and easy judgments, advice, and pressures, they have moved from argentina to a gorgeous sea place in uruguay, where alex’s father works as a marine biologist and rescues marine life hurt by fishing. we don’t learn what alex’s mather does, and alex’s father is in any case more central to the movie, though the dynamics between mother and father and their respective expectations and doubts about their daughter (as well as her rapport to them) all get due consideration.
in fact, the film is exceptional, it seems to me, in the way in which it manages, in a scant hour and 20 mins, to touch on so many relationships, or on so many ways in which a small group of people negotiate their own personal issues in relation to the other members of the group.
the film starts when friends of the mother’s, a couple with a teenage boy, come to visit the ex-pat family allegedly to take a look at alex. the father is a surgeon who does cosmetic surgery but also all sorts of fixings, like removing fingers from children who are born with more than the prescribed ten. soon the tension becomes as thick as molasses. first-time director lucÃa puenzo hones in on it in small vignettes involving the two adult couples and in much longer scenes involving the two kids. at home with difference and freakishness, alex immediately identifies the weakness of a man who fixes people for a living and brings it up provocatively when talking with his son. alvaro, the boy, is protective of his father (we learn later that he looks up to him tremendously) but is also immensely captivated by the boyish and very beautiful alex, who is free spirited, wild, a bit of a loner, in love with her dad, and very much her own person. i think it is a sign of how good this film is that alvaro goes from being a gawky, rather unattractive kid to being mesmerizing. at the end, you find him beautiful, too.
while the tension between the two sets of parents — two wed to normality, two wed to difference and the fierce protection of their daughter’s integrity — escalates, the kids frolic and, well, fall in love. or lust. not sure it’s different when you are fifteen, but if it is, i vote for love.
which is rather, well, intense, because given the number of organs and orifices involved, the fucking, as you can imagine, turns out to be rather unorthodox, thus raising a ton of extremely disturbing feelings in both kids.
if, albeit disturbed, the kids do not seem particularly worried about specifically what to call their love, the adults are, especially since the issue of whether to turn alex into a proper girl or leave her to be whatever the heck she wants to be is the very reason why they are all in the same house. in a heartbreaking scene in the second half of the movie, alvaro’s father fake-praises alvaro for his crush on alex, because “at least you’re not a fag.” alvaro’s stunned and crestfallen face speaks volumes. (if you have seen/see this film, please tell me what you think of this terrible scene, which seems to come out of nowhere, yet i find gives the movie a lot of heart, so much so that i now feel the film would be missing a lot were the scene not there).
i like very much how in the very short time it takes this film to start and end you see at least four kids come of age, in a way that is both simple (sex is sex and attraction is attraction) and immensely complicated. the complications come, not only from the parents, who, after all, are kept pretty much at the margins of the children’s dramas, but from the intensity of the love and attraction alex engenders with her indisputable charisma, her brooding unhappiness, and the life-lust she exudes in spite of everything.
besides the scene between alvaro and his father i’d also like to single out the final scene between alex and alvaro, which is intense, tender, and cruel in a way that, again, felt very much real. alex is, after all, a freak, and she cannot but deal with love with alternating skittishness, violence, and extreme vulnerability. there is no sentimentality for her, not yet, maybe not ever. except, maybe, with her mom and dad, especially her dad, who, when she was born, refused surgery because he took a look at her and found her “perfect.”
i find this film touches rather movingly on growing up different, on parenting children who do not come out quite as we expected/wanted them, on trying to fix the world in ways that are right or wrong or both, and on finding ways to talk to each other about extremely difficult things.
Nice review Gio. I too enjoyed this film, and while its portrait of the central adolescent characters might come across as a bit too utopic (the boy in Uruguay, who is also enamored with Alex, was loosely sketched though I was very curious about his character’s motivations). The scene between Alvaro and his dad was harsh, but I think the father was too invested in hetero “normality,” and it was obvious to me that Alvaro was definitely questioning his sexuality (which makes Alex all the more desirable; she’s both one gender and the other). It’s a good film.