GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE

FEBRUARY 20, 1998

Evenings Out

'You'll always be our child'

'Ma Vie en Rose' is a gentle, touching view of transgender childhood

JEAN-CLAUDE LOTHER

Reviewed by Matt Wolf

ASSOCIATED PRESS

Ludovic Fabre (Georges du Fresne) is a wide-eyed seven-year-old with beautiful brown hair and an adoring family made up of considerate parents and three supportive older siblings.

There is one thing that makes him different from most other boys his age-he wants to be a girl. To Ludo, as he is called, nothing could be more natural to him than to change his gender. He will be a girl, no doubt about it.

This is the starting point of Belgian director Alain Berliner's truly lovely film, which opened in the United States just in time to qualify as one of 1997's best. First seen in the Director's Fortnight at the Cannes Film Festival in May, Ma Vie en Rose, translated in English as "My Life in Pink," is gentle, touching and wise.

Without ever resorting to preachiness or polemics, it's a telling look about gender ambiguity that could not be more clear-eyed. In its own subtle way, this is a genuine feelgood movie, though not if you expect such

Seven-year-old Ludovic wears a bridal veil for a wedding he stages with a neighbor boy.

films to wallow in sentimentality. That, Ma Vie en Rose does not.

Though always moving, the film soberly addresses the problems and pressures of raising a child who plays with dolls and who would prefer not to carouse with young neighbor Jerome (a poker-faced Julien Riviere) when he could marry him instead.

"Boys don't marry other boys," says Ludovic's hairdresser mother Hanna (a radiant Michele Laroque), but Ludo perseveres.

As he views it with all the earnestness of youth, his desires have less to do with being

gay he barely knows what the term "bent" means-than with a simple scientific error: His X (or female) chromosome "fell in the trash" when his genes were being allotted. In other words, he's really a girl whom God made a boy by mistake.

In outline, Ma Vie en Rose sounds as if it could be too whimsical, and some of Ludo's more ornate fantasy sequences are a bit overdone.

Mostly, however, the movie is remarkable for the compassion shown toward a complex subject that has implications from which

Ludo dances with grandmother Elisabeth, who wants his parents to indulge his crossdressing.

JEAN-CLAUDE LOTHER

director Berliner doesn't shy away.

The fragility of neighborly relations has rarely been as well-shown as in a chilling scene late in the film when the community turns icily against the Fabres. (Hanna's subsequent come-uppance is an unexpected comic delight.)

And Ludo's classmates turn out to be far less tolerant than his own family, threatening one day after sports "to pull it off”—no prizes for guessing what "it" is—“and make you a real girl.”

It's the members of the Fabre clan themselves who stick by Ludo, even as his exploration of gender costs father Pierre (JeanPhilippe Ecoffey) his job and eventually his house. Grandmother Elisabeth (Hélène Vincent) urges Ludo's parents to indulge his cross-dressing desires in order to "banalize" his fantasy by enacting it.

But Ludo's determination goes too faror so his mother thinks-in a climactic moment that cunningly pits Ludo against his equivalent, the tomboyish Christine (Raphaelle Santini).

It's typical of the sensibility of the film that it ends not with a "cure" or with anything so neat, preferring to conclude on the implication that the family will see the matter through.

A lot of lip service is paid on and off screen to talk of family values, but Ma Vie en Rose is one of the few films of late to make such closeness a given. It's helped even more by a cast that generates real warmth, starting with newcomer du Fresne, who was ten when the film was shot. "Whatever happens, you'll always be our child," Ludo is told at the end.

This family is of value, and so is Ma Vie en Rose. The movie was this year's Belgian entry for the Academy Award for best foreign film, although it was not nominated. It did, however, win a Golden Globe award for Best Foreign Film last month.

Ma Vie en Rose has been rated R. That restriction seems a shame, since everyone should see it.

Ma Vie en Rose (running time, 88 minutes) opens Feb. 27 at the Cedar-Lee in Cleveland, and in March at the Drexel East in Columbus.