Tomboy
Written and directed by Céline Sciamma
Hold-Up Films
THE YOUNG FRENCH writer/director Céline Sciamma makes films that are empathetic and honest about the confusion that attends children’s sexual awakenings. Her first feature, 2007’s Water Lilies, dealt tenderly with the terrors and indignities of adolescent sexuality among a group of fifteen-year-old girls. Her latest film, Tomboy, explores an earlier and even more bewildering stage of life.
Tomboy’s star is Zoé Héran as the ten-year-old Laure, a little girl with short hair, high cheekbones, an angular jaw, and a dimpled chin. Laure’s family has just relocated, and among the new neighbors she meets is a pretty, slightly older girl named Lisa. When Lisa assumes that her new neighbor is a boy, Laure goes along with it. She tells Lisa that her name is Mikael and begins adopting the behaviors of the neighborhood boys.Sciamma presents masculine and feminine identities through the eyes of a child who doesn’t fit in, showing the way both boys and girls try on attitudes and behaviors, and how they—like most of us—perceive gender through a set of stereotypical traits. Lisa assumes Laure to be a boy because of her short hair, loose shorts, and T-shirts. But having embraced this identity, Laure feels compelled to maintain the illusion and practices boyish behaviors—cocky poses and gratuitous spitting—at home in the mirror.
Much in the film will resonate with those who didn’t fit gender norms as a child, but everyone can appreciate its naturalistic, un-Hollywood depiction of childhood. The story is told from Laure’s point of view, so the adult world is mysterious—none of the parents are even given names. In some ways it’s a fantasy of childhood, or what childhood used to be. Her parents are affectionate to Laure and her six-year-old sister Jeanne, even indulgent in a healthy way. They let their children play at being adults—steering the car on daddy’s lap or trying a sip of beer—but also let them be children, going off into the woods to play all day unsupervised. They trust their children and take them at face value; they aren’t the hovering or suspicious parents of so many American films, and lives.
As the adult world is mysterious to Laure, she is mysterious to the audience. She doesn’t say much, so we mostly understand her motivations and reactions through Héran’s expressive face. Sciamma refuses to give easy answers to the complex questions she raises. Is Laure transgender, lesbian, or just a tomboy who wants the freedom to roughhouse and play soccer, something the boys won’t let Lisa do? We don’t know, and the ten-year-old Laure doesn’t know either. Sciamma doesn’t psychoanalyze her characters and doesn’t dictate our responses through exposition or a musical score. Rather than answers, Sciamma presents an experience of childhood that’s unique to Laure but also universal. At only 82 minutes, Tom-boy has the gentle pace of long summer days spent playing outdoors until your mother demanded that you come inside. It has the patience of knowing that there’s still plenty of time before sundown.
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Jeremy C. Fox is a community reporter and freelance writer living in Boston.
