Tomboy - no more, no less

This is a Festival review of Tomboy (2011)

More views of - or at - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

16 September

This is a Festival review of Tomboy (2011)

* Contains spoilers *

A note on paedophilia: according to the approach to school or church nativity plays that says that anyone wanting to film them cannot, because they could be directly editing their own pornography, we should not have been shown this film in which Laure / Mikael (Zoé Héran) and her / his sister Jeanne (enchantingly played by Malonn Lévana, with a real 'knowing innocence') are shown writhing around, as children do, and even having a bath. What nonsense !


This film encapsulates so much about childhood that, one imagines, is unlikely to change (or to have changed from when Céline Sciamma was a child): pretending / pretence (that one is stronger / cleverer than one is or that one's parents have fascinating jobs or large amounts of money); knowing that something will not work out, but not caring to think it through; a sense of foreboding when something that has to happen is being put off; being surprised; humiliation; secrets (and secret hiding-places); threatening to tell one's mother or making a deal not to tell; being confronted with what one has done, etc.

Incidentally, the film has as its centre a girl who can convincingly pass herself off as a boy (sometimes with prosthetic help!), who does so, attracted to the group of boys seen near the outset of living in a new house, and proving to be as good a footballer and to match their physical strength in other respects. It really does not matter why she does this, what she thinks will happen when she has to join the fourth grade, or even that it may - or may not - be read as a desire to be a boy (and later a man), rather than accepted as one.

I think the latter, that Laure hasn't thought it through, but doesn't want to face what Lisa was told when she wanted to play football, that she thinks. She doesn't think through what deceiving Lisa will do to her feelings, she just - without much heed to the consequences, except when she might have been caught out squatting to urinate and wets her shorts - sets out to be a boy. She does it, and the way that she draws Jeanne into the whole affair is utterly engaging, as are the scenes in which they have fun together outside Laure's plans. As I said, so many scenes that capture the essence of childhood and the childlike, with the issue of the particular path that Laure is following as Mikael very much secondary for me.