by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last Tuesday, January 23, the SAME Alliance in San Diego
showed a quite compelling gender-bending movie from Argentina called XXY — in what imdb.com would call a “Crazy Credit” the
film’s title is made to look like three X’s in which the bottom right bar of
the last X has been broken off to make it resemble a Y — a quite clever
metaphor for the film’s leading character, Alex (Inés Efron), the teenage child
of marine biologist Kraken (Ricardo Darín) and his wife Suli (Valeria
Bertuccelli). It’s the summer and she’s with her parents on a field project
researching what’s happening to some seagoing turtles — the film supposedly
takes place in Uruguay but someone who doesn’t live there would probably have a
hard time telling it apart from Argentina — and during her time there she’s
beaten up her former best friend Vando (Luciano Martín Nóbile) and is in the
middle of a weird relationship with a young, rather effeminate man named Alvaro
(Martín Pirovansky). It’s been billed as a Transgender movie but it goes pretty
far beyond the norms of Transgender cinema (including the one another local
political group, Canvass for a Cause, showed last weekend called In
the Wrong Body, a pretty straightforward
documentary about a male-to-female transformation whose only novelty was that
it was made and set in Cuba — and the Transgender person we see undergoing the
transition, Mavi Susel, had the operation in 1988 and, though she received
personal congratulations from Fidel Castro’s office, the operation was
subsequently banned in Cuba and not performed there again until 2007) because
Alex is not a female-to-male Transgender (which itself would be an odd enough
subject for a film!) but the type of person once called a hermaphrodite and now
commonly (or at least politically correctly) referred to as Intersex — having
fully functional male and female
genitalia.
Writer-director Lucía Puenzo, working from a short story called
“Cinismo” by Sergio Bizzio, managed to create a rare and beautiful film full of
the kinds of symbolism and irony that seem to come naturally to Argentine
writers. The film opens with Kraken dissecting a marine animal that’s been fished
out of the ocean (he’s mostly studying turtles but the creature on his
dissecting table looks like a ray), and the rest of the movie is full of images
of slicing and dicing, reflecting the dilemma Alex is in as to whether she
should choose to be operated on to lose her female genitals or her male ones —
and the images of living or once-living things being cut up persists throughout
the movie, including one chilling scene in which we see Alex’s mother chopping
a carrot shortly after we’ve seen Alex with one of her dolls to which she’s
attached a carrot to give the female doll male sex characteristics. There’s
also a weird scene in which Alvaro and Alex have sex until Alex’s dad catches
them — only Alvaro is on the bottom and Alex is fucking him. At first we think — or at least I thought — she was
merely rubbing herself against his butt and reaching orgasm that way, but later
we’re told that she actually has a penis and was penetrating him more or less
for real. Later on Alvaro’s dad says, “Well, at least he’s not a fag” — and
though the imdb.com synopsis says that Alvaro’s experience with Alex is what
shows him he is Gay, I don’t read
the film quite as definitively as that: I thought the takeaway from Alvaro was
that his experience with Alex had opened him up to possibilities beyond
straight or Queer, challenging
the gender binary rather than reinforcing it.
Another nice touch is that in an
early scene we see Alex reading a book that challenges gender binaries
throughout the animal kingdom — before we realize that the author is in fact
her father: that having literally
“written the book” on gender ambiguity, he’s in a much better place to accept
Alex the way s/he is rather than impose a gender category. The film is full of
felicities like that, including Vando’s father turning out to be the turtle
poacher Kraken is looking for and Vando himself coming to Alex’s aid when four
other boys attempt to gang-rape her and demand to see her naked crotch so they
can find out if she really has both sets of parts (remembering Boys
Don’t Cry, I dreaded the outcome of this
scene; in a U.S. film on this topic, the most likely fate for the gender outlaw
is s/he would be killed and the film’s tragedy would be his/her martyrdom). XXY is a quite remarkable movie, an interesting addition
to the world of gender-bending cinema, and yet more evidence that in other
parts of the world people can make movies that accept homosexuality,
transgender status or Intersex status as just facts of life instead of feeling
compelled either to condemn them or condemn the Queer people to endless levels
of angst about their fates and
tragic outcomes. (It still
rankles me that Brokeback Mountain
got considered the greatest Queer film of all time by so many otherwise
intelligent people when it was really just the same-old same-old: two men fall
in love, one ends up Queer-bashed to death, and the other ends up an emotional
basket case.)
