Céline Sciamma's film is titled Tomboy, but the gender issues it delves into are more complex than any supposedly unfeminine preferences for sports and pants-wearing and other associations that linger around that antiquated term.
Laure (Zoé Héran), the film's young protagonist, is an androgynous sprite of a 10-year-old who, having recently moved to a new town with her family, impulsively passes herself off as male to the neighborhood children. Mikael, as she renames herself, spends the lazy end-of-summer days getting comfortable inhabiting this new identity, playing soccer with the boys and navigating a tentative prepubescent romance with the pretty Lisa (Jeanne Disson). She's obviously thrilled at the reinvention she's accomplished, though she hasn't thought it through beyond the moment. The start of the school year lurks on the horizon, and with it guaranteed exposure of Laure's secret, and the film grows increasingly tense as our happy hero(ine) continues obliviously toward disaster, the frisson of dread coming not from whether she'll be exposed but when.
Sciamma's first feature, the 2007 Water Lilies, attracted attention for its explorations of budding female sexuality, competition and friendship among three 15-year-old girls competing in synchronized swimming. It was a Catherine Breillat film without Breillat's uncompromisingly (and often uncomfortably) sharp edges. It offered some dead-to-rights observations about the way friendships between teenage girls can include the same depths of emotion and drama as romantic relationships, even as that distinction blurs between two of the characters. Yet it seemed to me just as interested in gawking at its central trio as offering them empathy, holding them up as potentially salacious objects in the name of presenting their story. Winding the clock back a few years to a character for whom sexuality is a faint idea -- when Laure's thin, sexless body is displayed, it's only as a reminder that, at her age, the divide between genders isn't so far a leap -- Tomboy is gentler and wiser in its portrait of youth. It's a step forward for Sciamma even as it pares down in scale to something intensely intimate and focused on its subject.
Héran is rarely not onscreen, and when she isn't, it's usually because we're seeing something from her character's point of view. A freckled blond with a snub nose and short hair that could never be described as a pixie cut (she resembles River Phoenix, a few years shy of Stand By Me), Laure is pleasingly uncute, with a gruff demeanor that gives way to affecting glimpses of vulnerability. Dressing in loose T-shirts or tank tops and shorts, she's completely believable as a boy, and grows more so as Laure teaches herself to move like one in order to fit in with the other kids. Beyond the deception Laure's carrying out, Tomboy is also a movie about that time in your life when you first begin to develop multiple selves to fit the different groups of which you're a part, acting one way with your family inside and another with your friends outside. Laure's transformation into Mikael coincides with her mother's giving her a key to their apartment to come and go as she pleases, and it's this freedom that lets her formulate an alternate identity that she preserves by keeping the worlds as separate as she can.
At home Laure's more of a child, her parents loving but also caught up in their move, work and preparation for their new baby. ("You're always hanging out with the boys," observes her mother, pleased, when Laure tells her she's made a new girl friend.) She spends much of her time with her six-year-old sister, Jeanne (Malonn Lévana), a dimple of a girl who adores her older sibling. The scenes of the two together, as well as Laure/Mikael's interactions with the neighborhood kids, are the film's strongest, capturing with unforced naturalness how children play, from the stories Jeanne invents around toys in the bath to the rule-based games and competitions amongst the boys. Jeanne seems the one most primed to uncover Laure's double life, but instead she becomes a gleeful co-conspirator, backing up her sister's fabrications and helping her trim her hair.
Is Laure in the early stages of a transgender life? The film, as much as it echoes the beats of Boys Don't Cry without the tragedy, rape and murder, doesn't peer that far into the future. Certainly her commitment to becoming Mikael is undeniable -- invited to go swimming, she makes a clay penis to put down the front of her trunks to maintain the illusion. Classic femininity doesn't come naturally to her as it does to Jeanne, who has long curls and giggles and dances ballet. But Tomboy also suggests that gender and identity are things to be tested out, not set in stone -- Laure, who frequently studies herself in the mirror, at different times has makeup applied and creates a mustache for herself out of hair trimmings, both masks to be tried on and discarded. Her path doesn't seem destined to be an easy one, but she has her family at her side. A third act reaction from her mother upon discovering her daughter's duplicity reads at first like cruel punishment, and then like the only reasonable response given the situation. It's one she knows will hurt, but it's done out of love, because Laure, in all her delightful complications, has to live in the outside world as well as the inside one.
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