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| Malonn Lévana and Zoé Héran in Tomboy |
In Tomboy, Céline Sciamma tells a simple story straightforwardly, which is in itself no small achievement. Laure (Zoé Héran), is a 10-year-old girl who moves with her family to a new neighborhood where, in search of kids to play with, she meets Lisa (Jeanne Disson), who seems to be the only girl her age in the neighborhood, since she runs around with a gang of boys. When Lisa asks her name, Laure, whose hair is cut short and who wears tank tops and shorts, impulsively introduces herself as Mikael. And from then on she's* just one of the boys, playing a good game of soccer and mimicking the boys' habits like spitting. There are some uneasy moments, of course. When she can't urinate alongside the boys, she sneaks off into the woods where she's startled by a boy and wets her pants. Invited to go swimming, she cuts the top off of her swimsuit and makes a penis out of modeling clay to stuff in the bottom. And most fraught of all, Lisa develops a crush on Mikael and kisses him. At home, Laure continues to be a girl in the eyes of her mother (Sophie Cattani), who is in the late stages of a difficult pregnancy that means she must rest as much as possible, and her father (Mathieu Demy), who works long hours in the computer business. But she has a confidante in her 6-year-old sister, Jeanne (Malonn Lévana), who keeps quiet about the deception and aids in it. The crisis comes when Laure takes Jeanne out to play with the gang and one of the boys, Rayan (Rayan Boubekri), shoves Jeanne for annoying him. Laure/Mikael retorts by beating him up, which brings Rayan's angry mother to their house to complain to Laure's mother that Rayan was beaten by her son. Painful disclosures follow. The directness with which Sciamma tells the story is the film's great strength. It doesn't devolve into "Afterschool Special" sentimentality, melodrama, or message-peddling. It understands Laure, but doesn't dabble in causalities: We see, for example, that she's much closer to her father, who lets her sit on his lap and steer their automobile, and who takes a more tolerant air toward the situation than does Laure's mother, but the film doesn't project any psychological "insight" into their relationship. Zoé Héran is extraordinary, superbly androgynous as Laure/Mikael, but all of the very young cast give the film its sturdy underpinning of truth.
*Yes, there's a pronoun problem. I've mostly stuck with feminine pronouns for Laure because it's not entirely clear that she will continue the transition from female to male in later life.
