Girl Review

Film Block:

Director: Lukas Dhont

Screenplay: Lukas Dhont, Angelo Tijssens

Cast: Victor Polster, Arieh Worthalter

Written and directed by Lukas Dhont, the film Girl is a view into the life of an adolescent transgender girl, Lara (played by Victor Polster), who is attending a dance academy while trying to cope with the fact that she was born in the wrong body. When the film picks up, she and her father are in the process of meeting with a doctor to prepare for a surgery that will change Lara’s genitalia into that of a male. Lara (played by Victor Polster) is excited for the surgery, but continues to have setbacks throughout the film that eventually drive her over the edge and lead to a graphic and emotional ending.

This film gets a few things right, but overall misses the mark on one huge aspect: the pacing. The first two thirds of it were rather boring and repetitive; the scenes would rotate between Lara in her dance class at school, to Lara living at home and looking disdainfully at her body in the mirror, to Lara and her father at the doctor’s office. Dance, home, doctor, over and over again. I found myself spacing out a bit during this part of the film because nothing new was happening in the plot. I understood Lara’s life and her character, but I didn’t understand why this part of the film had to be drawn out for so long.

Then Lara finds out from her doctor that her surgery has to be delayed because she’s been dehydrating herself so much and taping her genitals down, both of which are bad for her body. Her doctor tells her that she needs to start taking care of her body better before she will be allowed to have the surgery. Lara is visibly upset, and her father reaches out to her a few times to make sure that she’s okay. Lara insists that she’s fine, and doesn’t talk about what’s bothering her. Then all of a sudden the film ends in a horribly graphic way that had me with my ears plugged and eyes closed, curled up in my seat in the theater.

This extreme change of pace shocked me to my core and left me angry and upset when I was walking out of the movie. It felt like someone had woken me up from a nap by tossing a bucket of ice water in my face -- I felt betrayed by the film because there had been no indicators by either the actors or the writers that Lara was going to do something so extreme and graphic at the end of the film. In a film such as The House That Jack Built, viewers generally expect to see a lot of violence and gore (which is why I didn’t go to see that film, because I have a very low tolerance for all of that). But Girl was the last movie that I expected to show those kinds of things, and the filmmakers gave the audience no tip-off that an extreme and emotional ending was coming at any point in the movie. I don’t feel that the ending of the movie was validated by the other ninety percent of the film. Lara appeared to have some emotional stress on screen, but not enough to justify what she did at the end. The tone of the film was a bit sad and distressing, but not distressing enough to suggest what would happen at the end.

Since this extreme tonal shift took away from a lot of the other good parts of the movie, it took me a day or two to be able to reflect on the film and think about the other good aspects. The subject matter is a very important one, and I’m glad that a film was made about a transgender girl, because it pushes the issue into the entertainment industry. One of the things that I did like about the movie was that it made me understand on a deeper level what it’s like to be born in the wrong body. Previously, I had always accepted transgenders as a part of our society without any qualms, but I never really understood them. This film acutely depicts what it means to truly hate the body that you’re born in, and the emotional turmoil of living inside a shell that you despise. By being able to connect with a transgender character on screen, I was able to see life through her eyes, and understand what she was going through and what her life was really like.

Even after bashing the pacing and tonal shifts of the film, I’ll admit that just having a strong transgender character on screen might be more important than whether I can handle watching a graphic ending or not. There are very few, if any, transgender characters in the media today, and having them in movies and TV will help the viewers understand them, as it did for me. So while this particular film may have been too jolty and badly paced for some viewers (like myself), it is without a doubt a big step in the right direction of educating people about transgenders and helping them to become a more normal part of our society.