Seeing Pink
A film with no romance, no aliens, and no famous stars provides a new understanding
of human sexuality.
Alan A. Stone
Ma Vie en Rose is, to my knowledge, the first cinematic exploration
of gender identity in young children. It is about Ludovic, a seven year old
French boy who is convinced he is meant to be a girl. The Belgian-born director,
Alain Berliner, was present to introduce the film at its Boston Film Festival
premiere. He modestly informed us that this was his first full-length feature,
as it was for all of the other principals on the production side. And then,
with a sense of moral urgency unusual in filmmakers, he said that he had concluded
that a film like this needed to be made. Many in Hollywood might share his
sentiments, but it is unlikely that such a film could have been made in our
bottom-line America.
Producer Carole Scotta selected the story (by Chris Vander Stappens) and
chose Berliner to direct it because she saw "son audace et sa poesie"
as indispensable for realizing the story's fragile nature. By film industry
standards, Scotta's audacity in producing the film is even more impressive.
Ma Vie en Rose has no action, no violence, no romance, no aliens, no
natural disasters--not even a recognizable star. It is certainly no comedy
and, though it is a film about children, many conventional parents will not
want their children to see it. In sum, it has no targeted audience. Yet in
a world that genuinely prized and did not just tolerate difference, this film
would have been made by Disney. It marks a new, truthful departure in cinematic
understanding of difference in human sexuality and gender identity in children.
Gay and lesbian themes are now commonplace in films and audiences seem to
take them in stride. It is difficult to know what to make of this. Are we
now more tolerant, more empathic, more able to respond emotionally to the
gay and lesbian erotic? Or is it, as I believe, that audiences--though more
tolerant--have also become as inured to these images as they have to violence?
Film has the capacity to deepen and purify the emotions or deaden the sensibilities.
The outcome depends on both the filmmaker and his audience. Gay issues pose
problems for both.
Edouard Molinaro's La Cage aux Folles was the first big box-office
film in which an enduring homosexual relationship was presented as neither
tragic nor sordid. When it was made in the 1970s, homosexuality, not homophobia,
was still thought to be the sickness. Straight men, even if not homophobic,
still kept their anxious distance from queer love. Through a combination of
wit, humor, and French sexual sophistication, La Cage aux Folles, based
on a play by Poiret, helped overcome these fixed emotional reactions. The
film's homosexual couple are faced with a standard bourgeois domestic predicament--the
initial visit of the prospective in-laws. One of the gay partners has a son,
the result of a heterosexual fling in his youth. Now grown up, the son is
about to get married and his fiance's conventional parents want to look over
his family. The art of this storyline is that it allows the conventional audience
to identify with the gay couple as they worry about how the conventional in-laws
(the audience in fact) will react to them. And the gay couple are so stereotypical
in their gender roles (one sensible, the other hysterical) that the audience
can see them through the prism of the traditional middle class family. La
Cage aux Folles was nominated for the Academy Award as best foreign film
in 1978. It did not win, but it earned so much money that Molinaro made a
sequel, La Cage aux Folles II, and of course it spun off the Broadway
musical. Although it was a farcical situation comedy, La Cage aux Folles
was a step forward in human tolerance and reconciliation. The film made it
possible for audiences to welcome the "gay couple" into the family of humanity
and to do it with pleasure. But unlike subsequent films, La Cage never
threatened the audience by confronting them with the homosexual erotic.
Last year, when Robin Williams did Bird Cage, his remake of
La Cage aux Folles, it fell flat. The farcical solutions seemed stale
and condescending to a more tolerant public with greater sympathy for tragic
gay and lesbian characters. But open-mindedness is not quite empathy--an identification
that permits a vicarious and transformative experience.
Only seven years after La Cage aux Folles, Pauline Kael reviewed in
the New Yorker a "startlingly fresh movie from England," My Beautiful
Launderette. What was "startling" about this Stephen Frears film was its
explicit depiction of a teenage homosexual romance. It was a modern-day Romeo
and Juliet--West Side Story set in South London--with two male
lovers: a Pakistani, Omar, and a skinhead, Johnny. Kael, ever sophisticated,
described it brilliantly as a "joyride of teenage sex" and emphasized the
true "tenderness of their love affair," without batting an emotional eyelash
over the fact that this was a "homosexual romance." But the mule-kick emotional
impact of this storyline comes precisely from its direct confrontation with
the homosexual erotic. Kael's worldliness about all matters sexual may explain
her seeming imperviousness. But ordinary filmgoers--especially the straight
men in the audience--cannot escape so easily. My Beautiful Launderette
plunged into the depths of everyman's unconscious sexual feelings and demanded
a human response. Omar and Johnny (played with unrestrained passion by Daniel
Day Lewis) enact the homophilic impulses which are so often suppressed under
the macho of teenage gangs. Gay men could go to this film and feel aroused
and straight men could, if they allowed themselves, understand how this was
possible.
Ma Vie en Rose will never rival La Cage at the box office,
nor is it as challenging as My Beautiful Launderette. Still, it is
a major achievement. Ludovic is a girl-boy with the innocence of every other
seven-year-old child. It is impossible for a straight filmgoer not to empathize
with him.
Ludovic is the youngest of four children in a French family that has finally
begun to solve its financial problems. They have just moved into the French
equivalent of Levittown and are preparing for a house warming. As the story
unfolds we learn that Ludovic's father, Pierre, has become friendly with his
boss (and neighbor) who has personally assured him that even in the face of
downsizing, Pierre's good job will be secure because of their friendship.
After years of skimping, Ludovic's parents, Pierre and Hanna, are in a celebratory
mood as they prepare to greet their new neighbors. No one in the film has
a last name, but in the spirit of the story it would be appropriate to call
Ludovic's family the Roses.
The camera gives us a sense of the Roses' new middle-class neighborhood and
glimpses of the tension and grief that lie behind the neighbors' ranch-house
doors. Pierre's boss and his wife have lost one of their two children. The
mother has preserved her daughter's room as a shrine to her inconsolable loss.
Her husband and son must bear the weight of this burden of grief; it is the
wound at the center of their shared lives. Berliner wants us to see from the
start that every family and not just the Roses has its knots and tangles.
As we meet the neighbors, we are also shown a long-haired child primping
in front of a mirror. The child puts on large dangling earrings and daubs
on lipstick. One thinks of a little girl playing dress-up with her mother's
clothing. But this is Ludovic innocently preparing to impress his new neighbors
with his girlish beauty. The neighborhood housewarming is to be Ludovic's
"coming out."
Although there is nothing amateurish in Berliner's filmmaking, there is something
ingenuous about it. He describes the film as "halfway between dream and reality,"
but there are more dimensions than that. At times his exploration of families
has the sophistication of Ken Loach, a director he admires. At other moments
he shows us children's programs on French television and segments that look
like commercials. Then there are Ludovic's fantasies: a mix of television
and fairy tale created out of computer graphics. Finally, there is a world
of children, filmed at the eye-level of a child. Rather than imposing a directorial
will on this material, Berliner finds his way in it.
The film's title Ma Vie en Rose suggests Edith Piaf's "La Vie en Rose"--a
song about how life is rose-colored when one is in love. Sung by the wistful
gamine Piaf, the song suggests that her "Vie en Rose" will be all too
brief. But rose or pink is also the color for girls as blue is for boys. Ludovic
lives in a fantasy world of pink. Berliner, who with writer Vander Stappen
adapted the screenplay, makes full use of the title's meanings. From its first
moments, the cinematography picks up various shades of pink, including the
pinks of the nursery and those supposedly flesh-color plastic pinks of children's
dolls. Ludovic's French television fairy godmother comes on in a haze of computerized
pink, her ample pink bosom barely contained in its pink dcolletage. She moves
from cartoon figure to real person before our eyes in imaginatively constructed
cinematography.
But girl-boys like Ludovic are not just imaginative constructions. The "effeminate
boy," as he is known in the psychiatric literature, is one of the most persuasive
demonstrations that gender identity is biologically given. The girl-boy, to
use Ludovic's term, has the gait, habitus, and gender-distinctive mannerisms
of the girl-girl, and it all seems to be innate rather than acquired. Ludovic's
own imaginative theory is that when his chromosomes came down the chimney
one of his X's accidentally got knocked off. Whatever the explanation, girl-boys,
like Ludovic in the film, are a source of humiliation to their parents, are
tormented by their peers, and retreat into a fantasy world for consolation.
As this film poignantly suggests, neither the child nor his parents can be
blamed. And girl-boys like Ludovic, confounding all our stereotypes, may grow
up with a preference for heterosexual intercourse. Their innate gender behavior
is something like being born left-handed. Think of all the "sinister" stereotypes
that have traditionally been associated with left-handedness, and the unnecessary
discipline and punishments we visited on left-handed children. We may someday
come to think about children like Ludovic in much the same way. Ma Vie
en Rose is an enlightened beginning of that process.
Ludovic's "coming out" predictably shocks the neighbors, though Pierre adroitly
covers it up by declaring after Ludovic's grand entrance that his youngest
son is a great joker. But Ludovic's conviction that he is meant to be a girl
is no joke. A determined transvestite, he puts his short pants on with the
fly in the back. He is fearful and awkward at soccer. Worst of all, he picks
the son of Pierre's boss to be his boyfriend, and, violating the shrine of
the dead daughter, puts on her communion dress and stages a make-believe wedding
to the boss's son. The grieving mother notices the ceremony through a door
left ajar and is devastated by the sacrilege. The boss and the neighbors turn
on Ludovic and his family. The bewildered child is derided as a "tapette,"
French slang for "faggot." One sign of Ludovic's innocence is that he
understands only the word's literal meaning, and asks his parents why people
are calling him a fly-swatter.
Pierre and Hanna are in turn ashamed and indignant. They try everything.
They consult a child psychologist, who wonders whether they may have wanted
a girl. The psychologist's question makes Ludovic's mother feel guilty enough
to cut his hair, but her mothering is obviously not enough to explain his
behavior. Eventually the child psychologist gives up, acknowledging that the
therapy is useless particularly since her patient has no interest in being
cured. By then, Ludovic has been thrown out of grade school and the seven-year-old
is the moral leper of the neighborhood. He is also the cause of conflict and
resentment in his family as his parents quarrel and blame each other. The
bottom falls out when the boss downsizes and Pierre loses his job, their friendship
having long since turned to enmity because of Ludovic's sacrilege. Even worse,
the boss worries that his son is fond of Ludovic and has been corrupted by
the tapette.
At the moment of total disaster, Ludovic's family rallies round him: whatever
he is, he is their child. Still they want him back in the closet. Escaping
suburbia, they move to the French backwaters of Clermont-Ferrand, hoping that
Ludovic will be able to suppress his girl-boy nature and allow them all to
make a fresh start as a "normal family." Though it makes him unhappy, Ludovic
makes an effort to act like a boy. One day as the friendless child is mooning
around by himself, he is set upon by a bully who wants him to play, and retreats
into his fantasy world. Across the highway is a billboard bearing the likeness
of his television fairy godmother; Ludovic notices that workers have left
a beckoning ladder leading up to it. While Alain Berliner described Ma
Vie en Rose as "midway between dream and reality," here it is all dream
world, as we see Ludovic climb up the ladder and escape, in a Through The
Looking Glass moment, into his happy pink fantasy world. His worried mother
goes looking for him. Some insight tells her to follow up the ladder and join
her son. This dream-world sequence suggests that mother and son will be united
by sharing Ludovic's imaginative world. Who can doubt the wisdom of this unity?
More than a few of our greatest artists are in reality like Ludovic and they
share with us the gift of their imaginative world.
Berliner might have ended his story inside the billboard, but Ma Vie en
Rose continues until it finds a kind of solution in the real world. The
young bully who picked on Ludovic and wanted him to play turns out to be a
tomgirl. And as Berliner rightly recognizes, tomboys or boy-girls are much
less shocking in our patriarchal world than girl-boys like Ludovic. The bully's
mother comes to invite Ludovic and his family to the tomboy's dress-up birthday
party. Since the seven-year-old Ludovic is "back in the closet" he is to wear
a manly costume. The tomboy, miserable in her princess costume, soon gets
Ludovic into a shed, overcomes his desperate resistance, and changes costumes
with him. When the bedraggled Ludovic shows up in the princess dress his outraged
parents are ready to set upon him. This time, however, the tomgirl's mother
intervenes and the bully confesses that it was all her fault. Ludovic and
his family are saved from social exile. Clermont-Ferrand is it seems more
tolerant of gender-bending than suburbia was--the boy-girl has saved the girl-boy.
This moment of symmetry is not a happy ending: we do not expect Ludovic's
life to be a happy one. And yet perhaps, like Piaf, his artistic talent will
permit him and us to find community in what he creates. One understands at
the end why Berliner and Scotta were willing to stake their creative ambitions
on this project. And one can even hope that twenty years from now a remake
of Ma Vie en Rose will fall flat because audiences so much better understand
this kind of difference.
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