Gender blender

>>Argentinean drama XXY is a thoughtful,
startling story of a sexually conflicted teenager

by MALCOLM FRASER

Argentinean director Lucía Puenzo makes her feature debut with XXY, a thoughtful yet startling film that’s part family drama, part coming-of-age tale, and wholly original.

A Buenos Aires plastic surgeon (Germán Palacios) brings his wife (Carolina Pelleritti) and teenage son (Martin Píroyansky) to visit their cousins in a coastal town in Uruguay. Kraken (Nine Queens’ Ricardo Darin) is a marine biologist specializing in sea turtles. He and Suli (Valeria Bertuccelli) have a teenage daughter, Alex (Inés Efron), who’s tomboyish enough to kick a local boy’s ass, but sexually assertive enough to immediately and brazenly come on to the hapless Píroyansky.

XXY has a key revelation at its core. It’s revealed fairly early on, a sharp viewer might clue in even earlier, and it’s discussed openly in the press materials, so this isn’t exactly a spoiler per se—but even so, I enjoyed going into it blind and figuring it out for myself. So if you’d like the same experience, stop reading now and just go see it—it’s great.

For anyone still with me, here goes: Alex turns out to have been born with both male and female genitalia. Her parents have raised her in relative isolation to keep her from being harassed. Now that she’s hitting adolescence, both she and her folks are torn about making a choice between the two genders—a topic on which old-school surgeon Palacios has strong views. This leads to much soul-searching on the part of all the characters, trouble with local yahoos and a surprising sex scene between the two youngsters.

The cast is uniformly great, with standout performances from Darin as the tormented father and, in particular, Efron as the gender-bending teen. Her screen presence and emotional intensity portend greatness for the future.

Puenzo also asserts herself as a notable director, with a sure but subtle touch on both the narrative and aesthetic levels. The characters are both sympathetic and complicated, and the tone manages to combine naturalism with the high drama appropriate to teen emotions. Puenzo also judiciously deploys the unsettling cadences of a horror film.

Smart, unpredictable, thought-provoking and touching, this is a strong contender for best film of the year so far.

XXY opens this Friday, May 30

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