Girl (2018)

Girl was really, really strong and very intense. It also goes to places that most movies about trans experience are unwilling to go. In this way, I found Girl more engaging, more honest, and more brave than A Fantastic Woman or The Danish Girl or any other recent films about transitioning. Also the acting is phenomenal.

There are a couple more things to say about this really powerful movie – mostly because I want to respond, I guess, to the Los Angeles Times review of the film, which claims that Girl is exploitative, that the filmmaking lacks sensitivity, nuance and empathy, and that the camera's gaze is harsh and obsessive. I found every bit of this to be inaccurate and even to be a willful misreading of what the film is trying to do.

Girl is about a young woman named Lara (Victor Polster) who is unhappy with her body. From the very beginning it is hard to see Lara as anything other than a young woman. She isn't anything other than a young woman. Her psychiatrist asks her what is wrong early in the film and she says she doesn't see a young woman in the mirror, but her doctor responds that that is precisely what he sees, and it's impossible to watch the film and disagree with the doctor. Girl is also about a trans teenager who wants to be a ballerina. Ballet is a perfect lens with which to look at this experience of transitioning because ballet is so hard on the dancers' bodies and because young male ballet dancers don't dance en pointe but, of course, young female dancers do. So even if one were training in ballet as a small boy, one wouldn't have done the pre-pointe work that would allow one to be ready to transition to being a ballerina as a teenager.

The film is beautifully scripted, and the script prepares you perfectly for the places the film goes – and it goes to some very dark places. But Girl is always sensitive to the experience of this young woman. The Times review claims the film obsesses over the teenager's body, but we always see Lara's body from her perspective. She looks at her breasts and wills them to grow; she tapes down her genitals, wishing they would go away. These sequences are painful and very difficult to watch. The film anguishes over them. The film asks us to love Lara and she's intensely lovable, a model teenage girl, even. Girl even gives us an onscreen character who adores Lara – her father, played brilliantly by Arieh Worthalter.

Girl also shows us the numerous difficulties Lara experiences as a trans girl at the ballet school she attends. In one sequence – one that directly refutes the Times' reviewers claims of the camera's prurience – the other girls taunt Lara and force her to show them her genitals. The camera is interested only in Lara's experience of this bullying: we see nothing of what the girls see. Instead the camera is focused on Lara. We are not allowed – even if we wanted to – to identify with the bullies.

What I loved about Girl is that it is interested in the pain and the other emotional labor of transitioning. This is a film that is brave enough to visit the dark places inside our psyches. It looks at the experience of transitioning as complicated and worthy of exploration. It isn't satisfied with simple answers as to what is right and what is wrong, but it's a film that's willing to sit in the complexities of being in the middle of the transition, and it is interested in the toll that takes on a young woman's body and mind. It's a fascinating, powerful film that's gorgeously acted and beautifully made.