Girl

Lara, a 15-year old transgender girl, has recently moved to a new town where she lives with her father and brother. Before a sex reassignment operation, she starts a hormone treatment. Lara’s dream is to become a ballerina and she fights hard to achieve it. The film follows her day to day, focusing especially on her training routine, family life, and visits to doctors and psychologists.
By presenting Lara’s entourage as mainly sympathetic and supportive, Lukas Dhont’s promising debut feature eschews many of the clichés associated with transgender stories. The film focuses on a common teenage topic, an angst deeply connected with the excruciating wait for life to begin. In Lara’s case, however, this feeling is dramatically magnified because her body holds her back, forces her to inhabit a limbo from which she can’t escape.
With a superb performance by Victor Polster, GIRL relies confidently on action, body language and expression. In this sense, the scenes depicting dance rehearsals (with a touch of Darren Aronofsky’s BLACK SWAN) are particularly charged: visually stunning, extremely dynamic, they powerfully concentrate all the unspoken tensions and emotions experienced by Lara. (Cristina Álvarez López)