Tomboy: A review.

I’ve just watched the film Tomboy and I think this film demands a review. Of course, expect spoilers ahead, otherwise I couldn’t comment on the movie :P

First of all I need to say that I have watched this film with a purpose. As I’ve said several times already I’m studying English Studies and I’m more interested in literature than in linguistics. And what’s more relevant to this post, one of the topics I’m interested in is gender studies and queer studies. So I was watching the film with some ideas already in my mind.

Briefly, Tomboy tells the story of a girl, Laure, who arrives at a new town with her family; her father, her mother and her little sister. She’s a bit shy but when she starts to meet and play with the boys around, she introduces herself as Mickäel, not as Laure; and as she is ten years old no one can tell the difference because she behaves as a boy. She dresses with shorts and lousy T-shirts, plays football and one of the girls even likes her as a boy. In short, she does all the things one would expect of a boy of her age.

Things start to get complicated when she has a fight with one of the boys and he and his mum come over to Laure’s house, asking for Mickäel, and the mother finds out what she’s been doing. She rejects her behaviour, punishes her and then makes her apologize to the boy she had a fight with and to the girl she likes, Lisa, dressed up as a girl. Lisa’s reaction is of disgust. Then, she and the rest of the boys take her shorts down to check whether she’s a boy or a girl.

Now, overall the film was OK, it shows you how boys and girls mingle and play together; and  how the differences between a male and a female at this stage are not that important. You can really see that Laure, although you know she’s a girl, behaves exactly as a boy would and the rest of the kids don’t even have the slightest suspicion of her gender.

What I didn’t like at all was the ending. Lisa’s reaction could be expected but that doesn’t mean the audience must like it, and I didn’t. However, what struck me more and what made me hate Lisa was when she’s with the rest of the boys. One of them says that if Mickäel is really a boy, she’s kissed him as a boy and now they find out she’s a girl; that would be disgusting. She admits it is disgusting and accepts to put Laure’s trousers down. After seeing she’s indeed a girl they all leave, leaving Laure ashamed in the middle of the woods.

That scene was horrible, particularly because you emphasize with Laure/Mickäel since you’ve seen her development as a character and her relationship both with the kids and with her parents, and you know that her gender doesn’t really matter. What I found worst of all, was the very end. Lisa comes to see Laure/Mickäel, and she only asks one thing. “What’s your name?”

This could be interpreted in several different ways, I see two readings here. The first one would be that Lisa accepts that Laure/Mickäel as a friend and gives her another chance. The way I see it, however, is that Laure/Mickäel is now marked by her gender. It doesn’t matter how hard she tries, she will always be a girl and her name will be Laure. That’s it. 

What this end tells me is two things. The first one, and now I’m following Butler’s theories, that the distinction between a male and a female is performative and cultural, not natural. In other words, we are born with certain genitalia but that doesn’t mark what we are, the way we behave (our “performance”) does. And of course our culture does it as well. To give you an example, a woman that doesn’t wear dresses or skirts would be consider “masculine” in other cultures, it doesn’t happen anymore in ours. Applying that to Laure/Mickäel she would be a boy, regardless of her genitals or her name (I should have used the pronoun “he” instead of “she” then…). Of course I'm putting things very simple here, but you can see in this film that the dichotomy of men/women, divided by this bar that separates one thing from the other, sometimes is not that clear and to Laure/Mickäel's view, it's absolutely absurd.

The second thing that the very end tells me is that the gender of the person doesn’t matter. The kids of town have known Laure as Mickäel but in fact, she behaves like a boy so whether they call her Laure or Mickäel doesn’t make any difference at all. And for me, what this film proves is what Judith Butler and other queer theorists have been saying: that the dichotomy man/woman doesn’t work because it simply erases people that do not fall in this binomial and don’t feel they fit in. Perhaps in depicting Laure/Mickäel's life the film was trying to erase this binomial; but if that was the case the very end screws everything up.

However, I would not like to discredit the film, because although the ending is not really convincing (for me at least) it does something than many other films weren’t able to do. On the one hand it takes you to your own childhood, making yourself think about moments where the differences between men and women were not that visible and when it didn’t matter your gender to have fun. On the other hand, it challenges our own division of the society into men and women, showing how absurd it can sound to a girl of 10 years old that doesn't know that much about life but just knows that she doesn't look like herself in a dress and make up, and she'd rather be wearing shorts and playing football. The simplest thing as telling your name has terrible consequences for Laure/Mickäel, who suffers a terrible shame of herself just because she doesn’t feel she fits in a dress and with make up on her face. 

So, to sum up what I’ve been saying, the film overall is really good and although the ending is not convincing for me, it can be convincing for you. Regardless of your interests, this film doesn’t leave you indifferent.