I believe we are not unfamiliar with the word “LGBT” in today’s society, but do you really understand the meaning of this word?
In fact, “LGBT” is a combination of the acronyms for Lesbians, Gays, Bisexuals and Transgender.
And with the diversity and focus of film culture in recent years, we can see too many films on the big screen about gay and bisexual subjects, and today we’ll focus on transgender-themed films.
This week, a Danish film called “a perfect normal family” was released in French cinemas.
As the title suggests, the film focuses on an ordinary Danish family of four: a father, a mother and two daughters. The family lives a peaceful everyday life.
One day, however, this peace is shattered when the family is having a happy dinner and the mother suddenly announces that she wants to divorce the father because he has decided to become a woman, which brings a great shock to the two daughters who are in their adolescence. The older daughter quickly accepted the reality and started to get along with her “father” in the process of becoming a woman, going to beauty salons and getting her nails done together, and from time to time persuaded the younger daughter to be open to all this.
However, the younger daughter’s reaction is completely different from the older daughter’s. She is always in great distress, fearing the loss of her father on the one hand, and being forced to accept the presence of a new “father” on the other.
The whole film is also based on the perspective of the youngest daughter as the main line of plot advancement, from the film’s opening camera footage of the birth of the youngest daughter, the audience can clearly feel the father’s strong love for his daughter, and then switch to the real life scenes of the daughter’s growing up, and then from time to time insert the youngest daughter’s childhood video, these images gradually outline the youngest daughter’s growing up and the father’s establishment of a deep These images gradually outline the deep emotional ties established between the young daughter and her father as she grows up, and this interpolation also makes the characters more three-dimensional and fleshed out.
With this kind of padding, when the young daughter shows her inability to accept her father’s transgender behavior and conduct, the audience will no longer feel any sense of withdrawal.
Then, the film depicts the young daughter’s attitude toward her father in three levels, from rejection, ambivalence, and then acceptance.
First, she uses clothes to blindfold her father during the family meeting organized by the doctor about his transgender identity, and deceives herself into thinking that her father has not changed as long as she cannot see him in female clothes. Here the camera lens has not given the father’s frontal shot until the young daughter took off the mask.
Then, when the youngest daughter finds herself unable to escape from reality, she will always remind her father to continue to play the role of “father” in public, rather than the role of “mother” misunderstood by the surrounding, and to this end, she is willing to go on a family vacation, on her father’s birthday and family She had a falling out with her family on his birthday while on a family vacation. At this moment, although she began to try to accept the new “father” image, but this image is not considered “father” by the outside world, which led to her inner conflict.
Eventually, when her father decides to move to London alone for fear that his daughter will be maliciously discriminated against by her surroundings (which is not really obvious), the older daughter chooses to avoid seeing her father one last time, while the younger daughter shows her unique strength and understanding of her father. “and the reality of the father into one.
In addition, the youngest daughter in the film is a soccer player, and the testosterone-filled soccer game itself and the surrounding environment will give her a set perception and imagination of masculinity, which will also cause her to reject the female image of her father.
The film ends with a camera recording of the father and daughter on London Bridge, a perfect follow-up to the reconciliation between father and daughter that echoes the beginning of the film.
The film won the Big Screen Award at the Rotterdam Film Festival, and while the critics on Douban praised the film, they were also surprised by the strong tolerance of the transgender community in the Danish social environment.
In fact, the world’s first transgender person to be transformed from male to female through surgery took place in Denmark, and her name is Lili Elbe. The 2015 film adaptation of Lili’s transgender journey, directed by Tom Hooper “The Danish Girl”, which has since done well at major film festivals.
When we look at transgender people, most of us think of them as people who want to change their gender through surgery, but there is another group of people who just need to dress up to achieve deep satisfaction, a group we can call “transvestites”.
François Ozon, a well-known French director, made a film in 2014 called “Une nouvelle amie”, which tells the story of a man who likes to dress up as a woman after raising his young daughter alone after the death of his wife. In addition to showing gender transition and cross-gender love, the film also explores how to step out of the social framework and self-imposed confinement to be the most authentic person.
There are many factors that contribute to becoming transgender, most of them are the result of growing up with an external or internal subconscious call to not identify with the gender they were assigned at birth. They usually have a strong sense of otherness and believe they are meant to live as the other gender. Whereas transvestites or cross-dressers will change their dressing through their appearance to achieve the emotions repressed by society, they do not have a strong sense of rejection of their identity, so the two are still essentially different.
As our times change, the mainstream values of LGBT diversity have also made the entire social value system more inclusive, instead presenting a new type of value after democratization. If society as a whole improves its understanding and acceptance of minorities and gives them the most basic rights and protections, I believe that many transgender people will be able to embrace their original nature and live a more exciting life.
