The woman beside me called XXY a “…sweet little movie..” but I’m always nervous when entering a theater for a screening of a film featuring gender-variant people. Even the pink ruffles and Barbie dolls of Ma Vie en Rose led to anguish. All too often there are viscerally traumatic moments and tragic endings. It used to be this way for gay people. Luckily, progress marches forward and XXY is among a new breed of well-thought-out, complex and beautiful films that deal with the subject of adolescent intersexuality.
Alvaro and Alex hunched close over one of Alvaro’s drawingsThis is not to say 15-year-old Alex’s life is free from pain or trauma. I teetered constantly on my seat as this absolutely brazen kid tromped through her* small seaside Uruguayan town with a very outward sense of sexuality, even if she couldn’t identify what it meant in a binary world.
She’s lucky, though, to have compassionate, if not completely understanding parents, who have thus far raised her as a daughter. When her mother invites family friends to their home, one of whom is a surgeon, she knows that it’ll be tricky convincing Alex’s father to let anyone operate. An indeed, Alex has no desire to go under the knife, or even continue the female hormone therapies. Quite aware, even in her complete confusion Alex gives one of the best lines when her father has returned from a trip to visit an adult trans man for advice. He tells Alex nothing will happen to her until she’s ready to decide which gender to be. To which Alex replies, “Why must I choose?”
In the midst of these trials Alex has been expelled from school for belting her former best friend, the hunky, dark-skinned Vando. In contrast, she begins an unlikely relationship, in a set of even more unusual sexual circumstances, with the son of the light-skinned, citified, family friends, Alvaro, who is dealing with his own set of issues surrounding sexuality and relating to others. All in all, Alex is actually quite popular for an outcast freak.
One of the most powerful scenes shows the 3 sitting silent on the beach drinking an unlabeled liquor from a clear glass bottle. Vando tells Alvaro that he can’t handle Alex and would do well to go home, before he joins Alex in an oddly endearing silhouetted shot of the two peeing into the ocean.
And though the film is never quite crude enough to show us the young person’s genitals directly, first time filmmaker Lucia Puenzo, does a superb job of surrounding Alex’s skinny body and half breasts in beautiful shots of sand, wind and and waves. And actress Ines Efron embodies the unsure but headstrong child with a graceful confusion that fits elegantly into the frame Puenzo has so carefully constructed.
Though you may not come away from XXY with answers to any of your questions about either the construction of gender or what’s best for Alex, you’ll likely realize that it’s more important to learn to live with the questions.
XXY premieres at the Portland International Film Festival this Wednesday the 13th with another showing this Friday the 15th. You can read reviews from around the web, follow our complete coverage of PIFF and vote and comment on your favorites once you’ve seen the films.
(*Sidenote: I initially wrote this review using ze and hir instead of she and her but cultural and language differences, coupled with the fact that most of the characters call Alex “she” throughout most of the film made me think that was the more appropriate route to take in this case)
