I watched this movie recently with some of my trans friends, and while it was charming, I also felt disappointed and put off by it.
In feminism, there's the term "male gaze", which refers to movies, stories, etc., being made assuming that the audience is male and showing what would interest and make sense to a male audience; if you're not male, you may have this nagging feeling that it doesn't speak to you or want to. Well, there's a similar situation for trans people -- almost all TV shows, novels, movies, etc., that have trans characters present them them from the point of view of a cis (=non-trans) person. There's no attempt to relate to what it's like to _be_ them.
In this movie, I felt the movie makers tried to make the people around Ludovic understandable, but they didn't go to any trouble to make Ludovic herself relatable. There's no attempt to show how she feels about what's going on or how she comes to do the "weird" things she does. All you see is Ludovic doing some "weird" thing for no obvious reason, then you see the people around her doing things in reaction to what she's done, and when that's sort of played out, you see the next "weird" thing. She feels more like a plot device than a person.
Unfortunately, that's how trans people are portrayed in the mainstream media, too. We're just these weird people who want to live as a sex that most people think we aren't for reasons that make no sense, who are just weird for no reason. Some people think we should be tolerated (humored?), some people think we should be forced to be what they think we should be, and some just wish we would cease to exist. But we're never shown as being simply human. It's pretty alienating.
This is why I won't watch a movie with trans characters that isn't made by someone who is trans. I get enough of the cis perspective in Real Life, I don't need to go to a movie to see the same thing.
I am kind of sad, though: they had a set-up where they could have given the viewers some idea of what it's like to be trans, and they didn't even try.
In feminism, there's the term "male gaze", which refers to movies, stories, etc., being made assuming that the audience is male and showing what would interest and make sense to a male audience; if you're not male, you may have this nagging feeling that it doesn't speak to you or want to. Well, there's a similar situation for trans people -- almost all TV shows, novels, movies, etc., that have trans characters present them them from the point of view of a cis (=non-trans) person. There's no attempt to relate to what it's like to _be_ them.
In this movie, I felt the movie makers tried to make the people around Ludovic understandable, but they didn't go to any trouble to make Ludovic herself relatable. There's no attempt to show how she feels about what's going on or how she comes to do the "weird" things she does. All you see is Ludovic doing some "weird" thing for no obvious reason, then you see the people around her doing things in reaction to what she's done, and when that's sort of played out, you see the next "weird" thing. She feels more like a plot device than a person.
Unfortunately, that's how trans people are portrayed in the mainstream media, too. We're just these weird people who want to live as a sex that most people think we aren't for reasons that make no sense, who are just weird for no reason. Some people think we should be tolerated (humored?), some people think we should be forced to be what they think we should be, and some just wish we would cease to exist. But we're never shown as being simply human. It's pretty alienating.
This is why I won't watch a movie with trans characters that isn't made by someone who is trans. I get enough of the cis perspective in Real Life, I don't need to go to a movie to see the same thing.
I am kind of sad, though: they had a set-up where they could have given the viewers some idea of what it's like to be trans, and they didn't even try.