Inés Efron in director Lucía Puenzo’s film “Xxy.”
Published at Artist Direct, August 2008.
At dusk, right before the sun sets, there is a moment of complete indiscernibility. Figures become shadows, darkness and light melt into each other, and for an instant day and night share the same space. Argentine director Lucía Puenzo’s visually arresting and emotionally affecting film “XXY” celebrates this liminal space in-between: a place of indiscernible truth.
“XXY” shares the life of Alex, a knobbly kneed, 15-year-old Argentine girl (Inés Efron) who is an unusual intersection of genders: her body is home to both male and female genitalia. Her family attempts to keep her condition hidden by living in a coastal town in Uruguay, where her marine biologist father, Néstor (Ricardo Darin), treats the wounds of endangered species. As puberty progresses, Alex becomes physically more like a man everyday, eventually jeopardizing the secret beneath her clothes. Unbeknownst to Néstor, Alex’s mother invites her friend, a surgeon from Argentina, to their home to explore the possibility of “correcting” their intersexed daughter. Alex meets the surgeon’s son Álvaro (Martín Piroyansky), who doesn’t know of her condition at first, and they begin a tumultuous relationship that challenges the tolerance of their town.
In the hands of a lesser director, “XXY” could have been an insensitive farce or an over-dramatized movie of the week. Yet with the subtle pacing, beautiful imagery, and strong performances, Puenzo creates a movie as rare and unique as the free spirited Alex herself. Efron’s phenomenal performance effuses the sexual frustration of a person caught between two worlds. “If I’m so special, why can’t I talk about it,” Alex says. She is a blooming, androgynous Lolita who doesn’t fit into the binary of her world, where well-defined gender roles surround her. Instead she breaks the nose of her male best friend, showers with her female friends, and defies the sexual conventions placed upon her. In Efron’s alternation between aggression and playfulness, she reconciles Alex’s desperate desire to be touched and loved with her unwillingness to be defined by her own body.
But Alex’s very existence confounds these limits, daring to challenge the power plays of sex and love with her malleable sexuality
Visually, the film equally explores the starkness of the Uruguayan sand dunes, coastline, and broken beachside fences as it does the landscape of Alex’s body: her unbridled hair, xylophone ribs, and gently sloping spine. After all, the film is about all about bodies and the way they define the world we are born into. Boys will be boys, girls will be girls. But Alex’s very existence confounds these limits, daring to challenge the power plays of sex and love with her malleable sexuality. “In all vertebrates, including the human being, the female sex is dominant in an evolutionary and embryological sense,” Alex reads from a biology book her father wrote.
Outside of Alex’s own journey of self-awareness, her father grapples with his unwavering love for his daughter and the inability of their town to accept her. “From the moment I laid eyes on her. Perfect,” Néstor says. He wraps himself in a cloak of science by researching her condition and finding a local intersexed man who was forced to have the surgery that is being considered for Alex. Unlike Tiresias, the mythological Greek prophet who was turned into a woman for seven years, Alex has complete control of her gender choice and ultimately her destiny.
With Darin and Efron’s artful performances, alongside Puenzo’s meticulously crafted direction, the film shows the beauty that lies in the anomalous and infinite possibilities of teenagers sprawling in the dawn of their lives.