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A slow and moody story about a fifteen-year old intersexed person in Uruguay.
The story starts when a family from Argentina visits relatives in Uruguay; the visiting family have a fifteen year old son Alvaro who is a bit gawky and a bit introverted, but a pleasant enough youth. The Uruguay family have a daughter, Alex who, we slowly begin to understand, is intersexed (described as a hermaphrodite in most commentaries), presenting as female. In fact Alex's family used to live in Argentina, and moved around a lot because of persecution Alex received.
Alex is not easy to get on with, and has beaten up a friend at school; and she has suddenly stopped taking the hormones that prevent male bodily development. We also discover that her father is hostile to the idea of surgery for her (to remove the inappropriate physical parts). The visiting father is a plastic surgeon, and his daily work is the correction of physical problems, and therefore, we realise, he is the obvious man to help Alex if that is what she wants.
Alex badgers Alvaro to have sex with her, which he eventually reluctantly does, Alex takes the active role, with Alvaro on his belly underneath; Alex's father stumbles upon them, but doesn't intervene.
However he has kept an old newspaper cutting of an intersexed man who now operates a filling station, and he drives out and aks the man to advise him. We discover that the father has been there several times before, apparently without plucking up the courage to raise the issue. But although the man's advice is helpful, the only thing the father takes away from it is to avoid letting Alex feel that there is something wrong with her body.
The episode is not repeated, but one day Alex is out on the beach and a group of youths assault her, insisting on seeing her genitalia. Another boy eventually beats them off but Alex is in tears; her father knows the boys who did it and goes to beat the ringleader up, but this causes a rift with the visiting father who thinks he is going too far.
The film ends with the visitors leaving; in the few minutes before their ferry leaves, Alex and Alvaro are talking; it emerges that they never repeated the sexual encounter; they both admit that, to their own surprise, they have fallen in love, but Alex doesn't trust her own feelings or those of Alvaro, and is determined to leave. Poor Alvaro has just been told by his father that he will never amount to much and this seems to be the last nail in the coffin.
The whole film is slow and melancholy, and although Alex's father clearly loves her, no-one seems to be taking any decisive moves to determine Alex's future, whether this is to be as a man or a woman; even Alex herself seems to refuse to admit that the question arises. Like many films with a weighty message, the drama is depressing and the long sequences with nothing happening will bore the non-committed viewer. The dramatic performances by the two young actors, Inés Efron as Alex and Martín Piroyansky as Alvaro seem almost wasted in this film.
HF April 2009
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