XXY (2007)

Several other Argentinian films deal with gender identity issues, whether The Last Summer of La Boyita (2009) or Puenzo’s other work like The Fish Child (2009). The review here is of her earlier film, also dealing with an intersex person, and I think it’s pretty subtle and interesting, though undoubtedly it’s worth making a content note that there is a fair amount of prejudice the lead character has to overcome, as so often in this genre.

I like this coming of age story about Alex (Inés Efron), a young intersex woman—or at least that’s the identity she has chosen. It has a lyrical and gentle quality to it, although clearly not all the events in the film are in any way gentle—indeed, there are some really flagrantly nasty encounters, but on the whole they don’t define the character’s story or the way the film presents itself. But aside from Alex herself, it’s also about the family and people around her, primarily her relationship with her father (Ricardo Darín), and it puts the focus on Alex’s choice of identity, and the difficulty she has in doing that at what is already a trying time of life. I’d say it takes the genetic matter that its title alludes to, and makes it into a rounded, human story.

CREDITS
Director/Writer Lucía Puenzo; Cinematographer Natasha Braier; Starring Inés Efron, Ricardo Darín, Valeria Bertuccelli; Length 91 minutes. Seen at home (DVD), London, Saturday 3 March 2018.

Honey Boy (2019)

The Israeli director who made Bombay Beach and LoveTrue—both of which I admired and both of which lurk uncomfortably somewhere between documentary and staged drama—gets an ostensibly fiction feature with this one written by its star Shia LeBeouf, and thus fits into my American films directed by women theme. However, it turns out to occupy a similar territory adjacent to Shia’s own lived experience (though in the time after I saw this film and wrote the review below, questions have been raised about how truthful all of this was, and about some of his own behaviour), and tells a fairly traumatic story in an engaging and visually inventive way.

Shia LaBeouf is one of those actors I’ve always wanted to like—perhaps because some of the media excoriation of him has been so very ad hominem for so long—but finally this is a performance of his I can really get behind. He plays a fictionalised (only lightly, I gather) version of his own father in a screenplay he wrote and it very much puts him in the same territory that Joaquin Phoenix has been going over for years. It gets big and ugly at times, proper emotional turmoil, but it’s all underpinned by a deep vein of tenderness. That’s helped along significantly by Noah Jupe, who plays the younger version of himself, and very much holds his own in what is essentially a two-hander between the two actors (there are also some scenes with an older version of Shia, played by Lucas Hedges, but the dynamic between father and son remains similar). Director Alma Har’el has made a number of fine films in the past decade, which at least ostensibly have been documentaries, although these have always had a strong sense of performance at play—as if finding the characters at the heart of real people—so perhaps this step into fiction (but fiction based on reality) is a natural progression for her. In any case, she makes films with verve, humour and warmth, and that’s always evident.

CREDITS
Director Alma Har’el עלמה הראל; Writer Shia LeBeouf; Cinematographer Natasha Braier; Starring Shia LeBeouf, Noah Jupe, Lucas Hedges, FKA Twigs; Length 94 minutes. Seen at Curzon Bloomsbury, London, Friday 6 December 2019.