Tomboy Reviews

Since I really loved ‘Portrait de la jeune fille en feu’, I was quite eager to watch another movie directed by Céline Sciamma so I thought I might as well check this one out. In fact, it turned to be more similar to ‘Petite maman’, her last directorial effort, which was also a critical success, even if it didn’t really work for me. Still, in this case, there is no doubt that Zoé Héran gave here an outstanding performance. I mean, there are countless movies during which a man pretends to be a woman or the other way around, especially in the body swap genre, but it is most of the time rather pathetic and rarely convincing. However, with this movie, Héran behaved and moved exactly like a young boy would do, it was just pitch-perfect, and in fact it was hands down the best performance of a person acting like the other sex. Unfortunately, it’s too bad that the movie itself didn’t have much else to offer. I mean, basically, you see her hanging around with her friends and playing for pretty much 3/4 of the duration and even if this is minimalist approach was not bad, it was also hardly satisfying (I had basically the same issue with ‘Petite maman’). For example, they could have developed more her parents. I mean, didn’t they see how androgynous their girl was becoming? Didn’t they talk about it when they were together? Of course, the reaction of her mother was crushing and so humiliating, as if she was handling some broken window that needed to be fixed right away. However, it was the tricky thing, since they spent so little time with the parents, you never get the opportunity to properly analyze this reaction. On the other hand, how her little sister figure out the whole situation in a split second and smoothly accepted this new world order was pure gold. It was maybe too good to be true but it was still quite beautiful and inspiring. Anyway, to conclude, even if it didn’t completely work for me, it was still a solid drama and it is definitely worth a look.