March 26–April 2, 1998

movies

Ma Vie en Rose

A carefully non-threatening look at a cross-dressing 7-year-old.

Directed by Alain Berliner
A Sony Pictures Classics release

recommended

by Cindy Fuchs

Ludovic concludes that the corrective X-chromosome will soon descend from the heavens to land in his body.

An initial crisis point in Belgian filmmaker Alain Berliner's Ma Vie en Rose (My Life in Pink) comes when 7-year-old Ludovic (Georges du Fresne) and his best friend Jérôme (Julien Riviere) act out their wedding. They're alone in Jérôme's suburban Brussels bedroom: he's playing the boy and Ludovic the girl (he wears a delicate dress and veil), and the two kids stand before a mirror, admiring themselves. As the young couple seals the deal with a kiss, the camera angle changes to show the scene from another point of view, that of Jérôme's mother, Lisette (Laurence Bibot), who is peeking through the barely open doorway. She's instantly horrified. She faints. Jerome's father, Albert (Daniel Hanssens), appears on the scene and panics, quickly throwing Ludovic—the bad influence—out of the house.

This moment—as it moves from a sublime innocence to a not quite comic image of personal alarm and cultural anxiety—lays out the premise of Berliner's film, which is that adults are unable to deal with their children's inventions and imaginations, those strange, wondrous, ingenuous and powerful forces which allow kids—for however brief a time—to transcend real-world limitations and blindnesses.

The boys' induction into adult anxieties and social constraints is difficult and painful, particularly for Ludovic, the film's charismatic and remarkably sensible protagonist. Taking his point of view (he would be the subject of the title, the one with the life in pink), the movie presents the adults' perspective as embodying incomprehensible and intractable fears of difference. In this case, the difference, if considered from the boy's point of view, is quite natural, harmless, and—at least until the adults get into it—delightful.

The movie, co-written by Berliner and Chris vander Stappen, takes these issues seriously, but presents them in ways that might best be described as "adorable," and, as might follow from the kid's perspective, simple. From the first scene, it's clear that Ludovic doesn't quite fit in (and that the Message will have to do with tolerance). He makes an entrance at one of his parents' parties, wearing his sister's dress and mom's high heels, announcing to the assembled guests that he's going to grow up to be a "girl." As in the wedding scene that comes later, the general grown-ups' response is astonishment and dismay, and Ludovic can't make sense of their unreasonable and unexplained resistance to what he understands as fact.

The child's reductive formulations of the Problem are entertainingly naive (for instance, he concludes that the corrective X-chromosome will soon descend from the heavens to land in his body). His parents, Hanna (Michèle Laroque) and Pierre (Jean-Philippe Ecoffey), think at first that he's going through a "stage." But when other parents start snubbing them and school-administrator types start calling them in for "talks," they're shaken, and start acting out in their own childish ways (fighting, yelling, crying). The questions are no longer only about Ludovic's health and well-being. Now the questions are about them, their sanity, parenting abilities and gender identities.

As his parents become increasingly and visibly distraught over his stubborn refusal to budge on what they take as his confusion, Ludovic becomes increasingly resilient and clever, sneaking his cross-dressing or going to visit his enormously supportive grandmother Elisabeth (Hélène Vincent). She's okay with his conviction that he's a girl, somehow born into a boy's body, or that he will evolve into a girl. As the movie's major emblem of acceptance and grace, she's nearly as precious as Ludovic; warm, smart and grandmotherly in an appealingly contemporary way.

Elisabeth is not so broadly drawn as the major object of Ludovic's attentions, a popular television figure named Pam. She's the breasty blond Barbie-style doll who stars in her own television program, where she literally floats amid ecstatically bright colors, looks after her doll-husband and doll-house, and wears gorgeous sparkly outfits. Her appeal is plastic and pop-cultural in the most egregious ways, but she represents a certain respite for Ludovic, an escape from all the pressures to get in line. She's outsized and glamorous, tacky and seductive, a brilliantly vacant commercial product designed to get children to nag parents to buy the many tie-ins. It's easy to see why Ludovic wants to be her. And it's refreshing, to say the least, to see mass culture portrayed as an emotional and moral haven, a source of social education and inspiration, rather than the drag-you-down cesspool that it usually looks like.

That we are asked to share Ludovic's point of view regarding Pam and other matters makes the film's tone funny and nonthreatening (in other words, its Issues and Politics are clear enough, but not pushy). Its ostensible subject matter—cross-dressing—is hardly horrifying. Dennis Rodman, RuPaul and Marilyn Manson have made men, queer and straight, who wear lipstick, jewelry, and what used to be considered feminine-only clothing quite the common media sight. Ludovic's situation is less grand and more potentially troubling (for his folks and neighbors anyway) because he doesn't seem to be performing. Or rather, his performing is no more or less aggressive or false than the daily performing of straight adults (in business suits, in housewives' costumes).

It's telling that Ludovic is eventually "saved" when he meets a young tomboy named Chris (Raphaelle Santini). Having been hounded from their upscale home, Ludovic's family moves to an area that looks decidedly more modern, more like U.S. suburbs. And indeed, the new neighbors are nicer people, who think Ludovic's dresses are quite peachy. This resolution suggests that prejudices are a function of class and location, meaning, you have to watch out for those repressive inhabitants of affluent neighborhoods. And even adult fables can be reductive.