Chris Knipp Writing: Movies, Politics, Art


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PostPosted: Thu Mar 04, 2021 8:07 pm 
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SÉBASTIEN LIFSHITZ: LITTLE GIRL/PETITE FILLE (2021)
RENDEZ-VOUS WITH FRENCH CINEMA 2021 OPENING NIGHT FILM/B]


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Petite fille/Little Girl

[B]A trans child and her parents battle her school


A transgender reviewer at Edinburgh was shocked and offended. She railed at cis gender people for monopolizing coverage of trans subjects and even trans organizations. See "Little Girl: this film should not have been made" in Loud and Clear. Other, evidently Cis gender, reviewers seem to approach the film in hushed tones of respect and admiration, considering this too important a subject to get much into the film as film.

This issue is valid for minorities: they want to take charge of their own stories and they deserve to do so. Lifshitz, who isn't all that mainstream, after all, has swung back and forth between documentary and fiction films and frequently dealt with frank sexuality and with gay and trans themes before, may have earned the right to make a movie like Little Girl. For me, what's interesting about this film is that it hovers between the two genres so seamlessly, perhaps troublingly.

Lifcshitz's film flows back and forth between eight-year-old Sasha, born a boy but wanting to be a girl since age three, and his supportive mother so intimately, seamlessly, and artistically, that I thought this was a fiction movie - until I realized it could not be like Céline Sciamma's Tomboy, a real movie about a ten-year-old girl who wants to be a boy with a young actor who takes on the role.

I don't know exactly what's going on in documentaries where people go through their real life agonies for the camera. How much are events altered by that camera's presence? While Lifshitz's presence is seamless, he was not able to gain access to the whole situation, as a good documentarian usually needs to do, because nothing was filmed at Sasha's school.

Sébastien Lifshitz is a director who has moved back and forth between feature and documentary for twenty years, often focusing on gay themes, and though I've seen few of them, and their degree of success may be uneven, they seem interesting enough that he deserves some recognition. He seems to have constantly made the switch back and forth between documentary and fiction, wavering also between provocation and seriousness. His films clearly are often frank with sexual themes, sometimes gay, sometimes trans, sometimes swinging-both-ways. Is this somehow a particularly French directorial path?

His first was the 47-minute 1998 Open Bodies/Les corps ouverts, which focuses on an Arab-descent youth and his cinematic and sexual adventures. It was a good start, since it won the Kodak short film prize at Cannes and then the prestigious Prix Jean Vigo. Come Undone/Presque rien (2000), which I found in video stores and watched, is a feature about a teen gay summer love affair with hot young actors Jérémie Elkaïm and Stéphane Rideau. In 2001 Lifshitz made his first documentary, The Crossing/La traversée, following Stéphane Bouquet, his close friend and frequent collaborator, as he seeks out the identity of his missing American soldier father.

In Wild Side (2004), Lifshitz made a feature about a trans woman living as a prostitute who returns to be with her ailing mother in the provinces. Les Invisibles (2012) is a documentary about older French LGBT people and how they came out when it was hard to do so. Bambi (2013) is a doc about a trans woman who had a prominent career in Paris in the fifties and sixties as a dancer and show girl. Les Vies de Thérèse (2016) is a doc in which a well known French militant gay rights and women's rights activist Thérèse Clerc, facing the end of her life, looks back on it. Adolescentes is Lifshitz's 2019 documentary following two girls in a small town through high school and stunning public events in France; it was recently awarded the Grand Prix at Brussels and got six noms and two wins at the Césars.

It is interesting what Lifshitz has been doing these two decades. I would like to see more of these films, particularly Adolescentes. Judgments about Little Girl might be more informed if one knew the whole œuvre. All I can say is that this one is seamless documentary filmmaking, without being a great documentary. And it's about a timely subject, which the subjects themselves would like to take charge of. But if that trans reviewer were in charge, no film would have been made at all. Her rage for control may be excessive.

Little Girl/Petite fille, 90 mins., debuted at Berlin Feb. 2020, playing at nine other festivals including Poland's Doc's Against Gravity, Vladivostok, Chicago, Bordeaux, Ghent and Seville. Screened for this review as part of the all-virtual Lincoln Center 2021 Rendez-Vous with French Cinema, where it was the Opening Night Film Mar. 4, 2021.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.


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