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A moody drama featuring a pre-operative transsexual prostitute, Stéphanie (Stéphanie Michelini) living in Paris. She is in a love triangle, with a young Arab male prostitute Djamel (Yasmine Belmadi) and Russian illegal immigrant and army deserter Mikhail (Edouard Nikitine). When Stéphanie is forced to return to the country to care for her invalid mother, the three characters ponder their past.
The film opens with a scene featuring transsexual performance artist Antony Hegarty, of Antony and the Johnsons, singing a song with the lyrics "Are you a boy or are you a girl?" It does a pretty good job of setting the scene for the sparse, elliptical exploration of male identity that follows. There is quite a lot of sexual "action" in the film.
Stéphanie, Mikhail and Jamel appear to have found some kind of peace in their surrogate family set-up, but when Stéphanie's mother falls ill, she returns home to the country to care for her, which unleashes a flood of memories of her childhood as a boy called Pierre.
The film doesn't try to offer any concrete reasons for Stephanie's transformation. Instead the frequent flashbacks, and their lack of real insight, force her to reflect on the life she's made for herself and question whether Mikhail and Jamel love her for who she is or for what she is. It also makes the film quite hard work to follow.
HF November 2006
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