Tomboy: Sweet and Sour Childhood

A Berlinale Teddy Award-winning movie about a child’s game on gender identity.

This could be the refreshing story of a simple kid’s game that starts with a lie. A family of two just moved to a new neighborhood during the summer holidays. The youngest, 6-year-old Jeanne, is a very girly kid with long hair and a bright pink bedroom. The eldest is a 10-year-old androgynous child whom the movie does everything to depict as a boy - although the title may have already tipped us off. The game starts when Lisa, a girl living in that neighborhood, takes the eldest for a boy, who does not deny it and passes off as Michael. 14 minutes into the movie, the audience becomes accomplice in the lie when it discovers that Michael is in fact a girl, Laure. We feel privileged, as the family does not know anything about the little misunderstanding. 

The suspense of the movie does not lie in that discovery, but rather in how this lie unfolds. We get greedily caught up in Laure/Michael’s game and wonder how she is going to get out of that situation. We are impressed by how quickly she reinforces her boyish attitudes, observing the other kids on the block. Laure cuts a one-piece swimsuit into a swim brief and crafts a penis out of play dough to put inside her newly customized bathing suit. The suspense is intense when several times we fear that she is going to get caught. The movie thus shows the lightness and freshness of childhood, the complicity and tenderness between Laure and her sister Jeanne, bolstered by the summery bright nature where the children play, a verdant and open scenery. Thus, according to the words of the director, Céline Sciamma, this could be a movie about a girl pretending to be a boy after a misunderstanding. 

But what if it was not a simple child’s lying game? What appears as a misunderstanding may well constitute the long-awaited opportunity for Laure to explore her feelings about her gender identity, a space for freedom she has never had before. In that sense, the movie highlights the contrast between the lightness and playfulness of childhood and the seriousness of the main character’s feelings. In her exploration, Laure has to navigate across the very binary gendered child’s environment where the identification with a gender is everywhere. Games and behaviors are gendered, such as fighting, taking off one’s shirt during a hot summer day soccer game, and spitting. Looks are gendered, and so are narratives. Children tell themselves stories that are full of stereotypes. An example is when Jeanne, the little sister who becomes an accomplice, reinforces the masculinity of Laure/Michael by explaining how strong he is and how he protects her, a vulnerable little girl. In fact, throughout the movie, the main character’s manhood is contrasted with Jeanne’s femininity. What is more, the movie shows how gender and biological sex are closely linked for children, as exemplified by the play dough scene. Without masculine biological attributes, or at least substitutes, Laure thinks she will never truly become Michael. 

But more importantly, the movie illustrates that, in reality, biological sex has a relative relevance in the construction of one’s gender identity. Laure could perfectly pass off as a boy - she engages in all the social attitudes of a typical boy. And by adopting these behaviors, her sense of manhood gets reinforced. It thus looks like, more than the attribution of a gender at birth with the corresponding biological sex, it is the social perception, and the validation effect of that social perception, that bolsters one’s identification with a gender. In that sense, should Laure/Michael not be willing to identify themselves to the social construction associated with femininity, they could be considered as a transgender person. Indeed, according to the United Nations’ Global Campaign Against Homophobia and Transphobia, “transmen identify as men but were classified female when they were born, while other trans people don’t identify with the gender binary at all.” 

One could wonder what the point of categorizing oneself is, especially at 10, when the movie shows the beauty of Laure/Michael irrespective of gender. Were there no social expectations associated with gender, the biological sex would bear limited influence. However, early on in the movie, we feel the dilemma of identification will arise at some point. We can feel the heavy weight on Laure/Michael’s shoulders, having to choose between gender identities at such a young age, with the feeling of being at one’s life’s turning point and the consciousness that this decision is going to have decisive consequences for the rest of one’s life. Yet, in a gender binary society where everyone has to tick a box, we can already predict that it is unlikely that things are going to go smoothly and that the main character will probably not have the freedom to decide now where their identity lies. 

In sum, Tomboy seems to be all at once - a fresh and delightful movie about childhood’s lightness, sensuality and mischief, and a much deeper reflection on the construction of one’s gender identity, which raises important questions at a very young age. The movie’s beautiful esthetics, coupled with excellent actors, emphasizes the importance of cinema’s eye-opening’s role.