GIRL: An Irresponsible Drama Which Could Harm Transgender Viewers

One of the problems with film festivals is that, naturally, the most affluent critics will always have the first say on new films due to the extortionate costs of press accreditation and accommodation. This leads to a lack of diverse voices amongst initial reviews, and when a wider range of people finally see a film that previously premiered to rapturous acclaim, the consensus opinion suddenly (and dramatically) shifts.

We’ve seen it recently with films like Nate Parker’s Birth of a Nation and Martin McDonagh’s Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, but as flawed as both of those films are, neither possessed initial acclaim quite as baffling as that afforded to Lukas Dhont’s directorial debut, Girl.

Spectacularly misjudged

While there was some minor controversy at its Cannes premiere last year due to the casting of a cisgender male lead in the role of a transgender female character, this is by far the least of the film’s problems. Dhont’s film was conceived with an empathetic mindset, involving its real life inspiration (ballerina Nora Monsecour) in the screenwriting process after she declined to be the subject of a planned documentary. But her distance from the final product is starkly apparent, with her screen surrogate character defined entirely by her status as a transgender girl.

Dhont may have intended cisgender audiences to understand the struggles of transitioning, but his film doesn’t feel empathetic so much as it feels designed to offensively mimic the body horror of a David Cronenberg movie – Girl unambiguously “others” its protagonist, uncomfortably fixating more on her genitals over any defining personality trait. Lara is a blank slate of a character, and despite intending to collaborate with a transgender person for the project, the film feels like the work of a cisgender man fascinated with transgender people despite never having met any in his life.

Lara (newcomer Victor Polster) is a 15 year old transgender girl in the middle of hormone replacement therapy. She has a supporting father and a happy family life, and her ballerina training is going well – there are only periodical reminders of her transgender status, such as a schoolteacher foolishly asking the class, directly in front of her, whether they’re okay with her using the girls’ toilets. However, her treatment is slow-moving and having little effect, and an infection leads to a further delay of reassignment surgery. A new medication dosage and her frustrations with the medical process lead to the unravelling of her ballerina hopes, and further confusion about her place in the world.

Creepily Handled and Exploitative

Dhont has angrily lashed out at criticisms of his film that have cited his cisgender status, which although not a good look for any writer/director of a film with this subject matter, isn’t an entirely warranted criticism. It’s possible to make an empathetic, insightful piece of work about a transgender character without being transgender – just look at Sebastian Lelio’s A Fantastic Woman from last year. Lelio’s masterstroke was how he depicted the casual animosity afforded to transgender people without ever reductively defining his character as nothing more than her gender status. You saw the prejudice she faced through her eyes, effectively “othering” the cisgender individuals who would treat her with suspicion and deny her the basic right to grieve her partner.

Dhont, on the other hand, struggles to define his protagonist with anything approaching the same depth; his film feels intrusive, and borderline creepy, in its infatuation with her genitals, presented for the presumed cisgender audience to gawp at and satisfy their curiosity. It has the creepiness of the average Larry Clark film with its bizarre fixation on the body of its teenage character, and the other girls within her friendship group.

The film attempts to display the differences between Lara and her peers in the most male gaze-y manner possible, be it via fixating on the buttocks of teenage girls twerking in the ballet studio, or viewing their swimwear from behind. For all the things the film gets wrong in its exploration of transgender issues, very little has been written about how it uncomfortably sexualises underage characters in manners irrelevant to the central character arc.

Again, it’s possible to make the audience understand the complexities of gender identity in young characters in manners that don’t feel intrusive. Director Celine Sciamma’s films Tomboy and Girlhood may have taken ambiguous stances to the definitive gender identities of their protagonists, but both explored the fluidity of their central characters in a carefully considered manner.

Dhont’s film comes across as mere exploitation in comparison, and that’s long before the bewildering third act, when it changes gears into a Black Swan-adjacent body horror that quickly loses the grip of reality. Much ink was spilled about the casting of Polster in the lead role over a capable young transgender actress, and yet the third act reveals why this might be one of the few morally responsible decisions Dhont’s film has made. It turns the traumas faced by young trans people into pure emotional exploitation, and no young trans girl should be put through this for the purpose of entertainment.

Not only is the third act exploitative, it also abandons any basis in medical reality to come to a genuinely repugnant conclusion which could have severe ramifications to any impressionable young trans people unfortunate enough to have seen it. It’s an especially strange decision considering how the terms and conditions of reassignment surgery were laid bare by a doctor during the first act – Lara breaks a significant rule, and is granted a happy ending that would not be afforded to her in real life. It is genuinely repulsive, not to mention irresponsible, to only offer a positive outcome for its lead character after an act of self harm.

Girl: Conclusion

Girl is a genuinely repulsive film, so lacking in understanding of the realities transgender people face, the amount of acclaim it received following its initial premiere is disheartening. There are great movies to be made that will accurately and empathetically document the transitioning process – but for now, all we can do is ignore this reprehensible piece of work and wait.

Girl will be released in the UK on March 15, and will start streaming on Netflix in the US later this year. All international release dates are here.