It’s a tough life being a teenager.
One minute you’re a clear- skinned, sweet little bundle of naïve curiosity, the next you’ve got a face like an angry dot to dot, your parents have become inexplicably infuriating, and you want to hump everything in sight even if you’re not quite sure why.
Tough indeed, but not quite as tough as having all of those things and being a person of indeterminate gender born with both male and female sexual organs. So not only are you getting the hormonal explosion of one gender, you’re having to deal with all the problems associated with both as well as the lovely people calling you a freak and parents who don’t know what to do.
That’s the situation for Alex, anyway- the young lead of this brave Argentinian film from female director Lucia Puenzo.
Played by 22-year-old Ines Efron, who easily takes the ‘best actor called Efron’ title from rictus grin boy Zac, Alex has been brought up as a girl by her parents, but seems to identify more strongly with the male part of her persona.
To this end, she has stopped taking the medication that controls her male hormones, forcing a decision to be made on whether she will have surgery to make the transition into being a woman or begin a process of masculinisation.
We pick this up in bits and pieces as the film develops, and while the symbolism is quite often rather heavy-handed (Was that really a chamaeleon? We get it already!) and the narrative sometimes forced, the emotions on show are raw and convincing.
Efron is particularly excellent, and her performance as the confused intersex teen flips between force of nature sexual predator and scared outcast from one scene to the next.
She also stars in one of the best sex scenes of recent times, when, after kissing family friend Alvaro in a barn, she turns him over and, as her father later informs her mother, “fucked the boy through his ass.” You don’t even get that in Skins.
This scene is just one of the things that actually lifts XXY out of the trap of becoming preachy and over- sentimental. The film does a great job of dealing with what is still a taboo subject, but even without that, it is essentially a universal story about being a teenager, and getting caught shagging by your parents is just another part of that.
The film triumphs by refusing to make any assumptions about what the future holds for Alex, and as the story wraps itself up, her future seems much brighter than Alvaro’s (and not just because he looks like a young Nicholas Lyndhurst).
XXY is still a little rough around the edges, but it’s a bold and powerful film that succeeds with some very complicated emotions. The characteristically teenaged up and down journey from start to oddly uplifting finish will draw you in, making for cinema that you really can connect with.
[story by Tom Atkinson]