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The overarching framework for French writer-director Céline Sciamma's second feature Tomboy (2011) is not, as it turns out, a child's sense of gender. Despite accolades for that subject-prizes at three LGBT film festivals, the Berlinale's Jury Award for best LGBT film, and top prize at the Odessa Film Festival; one critic at Slant Magazine called it "this year's best film" (Costa)1-Tomboy is, from its languorous opening shot to its ambiguous final scene, framed by the sensibility of the European art film. That implicit or even opaque, delicate, often sensual sensibility-etched out over 82 minutes by cinematographer Crystel Fournier and Sciamma with careful framing, poetically-fragmented and respectful shots of children's bodies, and little dialogue-is so pronounced in Tomboy that a five-year-old girl is shown sitting in a Rodinesque pose, evidently deep in thought for some time, as if overtaken by the film's innate pensiveness.2
In its story of Laure (Zoé Héran), who, after moving to an apartment complex in a new town, dresses and acts like a boy, "Mikael," when out playing with other children, until her mother finds out and shames her (outing Laure as biologically female to her new friends), Sciamma's film seems made mostly to direct us, as adult viewers, to think and rethink. We should: reconsider our presumptions about the fluidity of children's gender; reappraise the fierce, stubborn independence of children who instinctively know what they want; conceive of a more tolerant, accepting world for children who wish to be seen as a gender other than the one imposed on them. In its instructiveness, Tomboy uses its simplistically antagonistic final act and its adult-targeting European art-film approach-its aesthetic only seeming to immerse us in an authentic, impressionistic sense of childhood-to go entirely against the form's implying, enigmatic sensibility. Sciamma's film instead proves shallowly didactic and even pedagogical. Indeed, for a story that situates its children in a free space that seems to transcend time and place (the town and the year are never known) for one near-magical summer, Tomboy harks back, in its inimical and authoritarian adult of a mother-figure, to the intensely moralizing and instructing tales of pre-1860s literature for children yet in a distinctly twentieth-century way. It so emphasizes and valorizes Laure's righteous, even Edenic innocence, in direct opposition to...