Boy Meets Girl - Movie Review
Boy Meets Girl is a movie featuring Michelle Hendley as Ricky, a trans girl in a small Kentucky town. It's a conventional romantic comedy: the main character has a long-term friend she's known since 1st grade - Robby (Michael Welch) - who has not tended to think of her in romantic terms until she starts to get involved with someone else. Meanwhile, Ricky is seeking to get into a fashion school in New York, and hovers by the mailbox hoping for the acceptance letter, but receives a "regrets, sorry" form letter instead, and is reconciled to giving up her dream of being a fashion designer. Everyone pulls together behind her back to crowdfund her so she can pursue her career after all, thus not only providing a happy ending to the fashion-design career subplot but also demonstrating to her that she is loved and appreciated and cared for.
Obviously, casting a movie around a trans person puts an unconventional twist on the conventional romcom architecture, which is in and of itself a powerful message: yes, you've seen this kind of movie before, and, see, you have no difficulty relating to the main character, so yep, we're people just like you are.
Hendley gives us a confident and admirably self-possessed Ricky. The situation is one that would have easily yielded quite believable scenes of alientation and violence and the drama of ugly confrontation, but this movie is not another Boys Don't Cry. Despite the southern conversative small-town environment, Ricky, who grew up here, exists as a resident, not secretive about her identity, and accepted at face value by considerably more people than not, and handles the exceptions with grace and courage.
The movie doesn't quite candy-coat matters, though. In the scene where Robby is accusing her of discarding her new romance interest, Francesca, he says she needs to be more careful about the feelings of people she gets involved with, stating that we are all of us struggling with issues of intimacy; in the heat of the argument he accuses her of excusing herself from emotional responsibilities she should be held liable for, worse than a real...
Robby halts himself in midsentence there but not before the hurt has been inflicted, and thus is the movie's most poignant scene set up: Ricky acknowledges what Robbie had said about us all strugging, but observes "yes, but the rest of you have an 'us' to turn to in those struggles. The only 'us' I've ever have to turn to contains no one but me. Would you like to try that for awhile and see how that goes?"
[Apologies for not having the quote verbatim; it was much better than I've rendered it here but I can't find it online and I couldn't exactly jot it down in the movie theatre]
That feeling of never having a shared identity-in-common, of always being alone with it, of not having a sense of "us" the way mainstream cisgender guys and girls do, is one of the most profound elements of being a gender-variant person. And why we seek a support community.
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Obviously, casting a movie around a trans person puts an unconventional twist on the conventional romcom architecture, which is in and of itself a powerful message: yes, you've seen this kind of movie before, and, see, you have no difficulty relating to the main character, so yep, we're people just like you are.
Hendley gives us a confident and admirably self-possessed Ricky. The situation is one that would have easily yielded quite believable scenes of alientation and violence and the drama of ugly confrontation, but this movie is not another Boys Don't Cry. Despite the southern conversative small-town environment, Ricky, who grew up here, exists as a resident, not secretive about her identity, and accepted at face value by considerably more people than not, and handles the exceptions with grace and courage.
The movie doesn't quite candy-coat matters, though. In the scene where Robby is accusing her of discarding her new romance interest, Francesca, he says she needs to be more careful about the feelings of people she gets involved with, stating that we are all of us struggling with issues of intimacy; in the heat of the argument he accuses her of excusing herself from emotional responsibilities she should be held liable for, worse than a real...
Robby halts himself in midsentence there but not before the hurt has been inflicted, and thus is the movie's most poignant scene set up: Ricky acknowledges what Robbie had said about us all strugging, but observes "yes, but the rest of you have an 'us' to turn to in those struggles. The only 'us' I've ever have to turn to contains no one but me. Would you like to try that for awhile and see how that goes?"
[Apologies for not having the quote verbatim; it was much better than I've rendered it here but I can't find it online and I couldn't exactly jot it down in the movie theatre]
That feeling of never having a shared identity-in-common, of always being alone with it, of not having a sense of "us" the way mainstream cisgender guys and girls do, is one of the most profound elements of being a gender-variant person. And why we seek a support community.
--------
Index of all Blog Posts