Will Sorg

French writer and director Celine Sciamma is, in my opinion, going to have a legacy long after she is gone. She has already gained a huge amount of critical acclaim and is pushing boundaries as both a female filmmaker and a queer filmmaker. Her most recent film, Portrait of a Lady on Fire is one of my favorite movies and easily one of the best romance films ever made. So it is unsurprising that ten years ago she was already making incredible films like Tomboy.
In Tomboy, we follow a ten-year-old French child named Laure as they move into a new town. However, we do not know Laure’s real name until later in the movie. In fact we are not even explicitly told Laure’s gender until they are addressed by their mother. Instead we are introduced to Mikael, the name that Laure has chosen to introduce themself as to the neighbor girl Lisa. Mikael has short hair, likes sweatshirts and tank tops, enjoys soccer and hanging out with a group of neighborhood kids which has both boys and girls in it. We watch Mikael as he navigates the nervousness and excitement of finding meaning in a new place. We see him play with the other children in beautiful scenes of childhood bliss. There is a hypnotic pattern to the film as we go through his day to day life and we see him slowly discover comfort and confidence in his identity as Mikael.
The film delves deeply into gender identity in a way that I really haven’t seen a film ever do before. It is so honest and realistic in this view of a young person discovering themselves. It shows us the good of it and it also shows the dark side of how people treat others when they are ignorant of how personal and important identity can be to someone, especially an adolescent. I think that something that really sells this portrayal is how good the child actors are. It is clear that Sciamma knows how to get an honest and nuanced performance from the children and it is even more impressive how good the lead children are. Zoe Heran, who plays Laure/Mikael, does such a beautiful and subtle performance. She gets all the slight facial expressions, the subtle voice inflections and the physical mannerisms that add depth to a character and make it feel like she’s not acting at all, just living the character.
One of the things that I really appreciate about Sciamma, as well as other queer directors, is the way they handle the representation of queer characters in their films. Even though Sciamma herself is a cisgender woman, she is able to capture the experience of a young person discovering their gender identiy because she handles it with such sensitivity and tact. She never makes the film about reveling in some grand queer trauma like many large Hollywood productions often do, dehumanising those who have suffered and turning them into props for people to feel bad about. Instead, she focuses on the genuine feelings of the characters and if something bad happens to them it is not for shock or sympathy, rather it is simply because that is the struggle that people have to face every day. Sciamma also reminds us through this movie that regardless of what others think of your own identity, they cannot take it away from you. It is yours.