Drag queens, transgender actors and roles: whether in competition or in its parallel sections, the Venice Film Festival, the dean of film festivals, is putting the diversity of gender identities in the spotlight this year.
For its 79th edition, the Mostra is offering for the first time in competition a film with a transgender actress in the main role, “Monica”.
Trace Lysette, known for her role in the series “Transparent”, plays a transgender woman who, after twenty years of absence, returns to Ohio at the bedside of her dying mother.
For Italian director Andrea Pallaoro, her character’s journey allows us to explore “Monica’s emotional and psychological universe while reflecting on the precarious nature of the identity of each of us when she must confront the need to survive. and transform”.
“Rethinking the Masculine-Feminine”
In this modest film, the filmmaker, who had offered the best actress prize to Charlotte Rampling in Venice for her role in “Hannah”, explores “the complexity of human dignity and the profound consequences of rejection”.
In another film in the running for the Golden Lion, “L’immensità” by the Italian Emanuele Crialese, himself transgender, it is a teenager, Adriana, who calls herself Andrea (male name in Italian), dresses and combs her hair like a boy.
Accepted as such by her mother (Penelope Cruz), she must face the more conformist vision of the rest of her bourgeois family in 1970s Rome.
“The visibility of transgender people is still exceptional in mainstream cinema,” notes French director Sébastien Lifshitz in an interview with AFP.
But he wants to be optimistic by betting on “the new generation”, which “thinks of themselves differently, wants to rethink the masculine-feminine and no longer wants to feel under the dictate of certain injunctions to conform”.
A perfect illustration of this trend is 26-year-old Franco-American star Timothée Chalamet, who hit the Lido red carpet on Friday wearing a lamé red jumpsuit with an open back.
“And I actually hope that this impulse, this desire, will lead to a greater diversity of roles and subjects in the cinema”, suggests Sébastien Lifshitz, himself in Venice to present a documentary, “Casa Susanna”, which traces in a moving way the birth of a community of transvestites in the very conservative America of the years 1950-60.
“Getting out of archetypes”
“It’s been a struggle for decades to try to get out of archetypes,” he observes, his documentary showing the distance traveled from the time when these identities had to be concealed at all costs or risk being exposed. banishment from society.
Thanks to archival images and the testimonies of still living members of this small circle, Sébastien Lifshitz succeeds in bringing to life an unknown episode of “prequeer history”.
The fight against rejection and stereotypes is at the center of the film by Frenchman Florent Gouëlou, “Three nights a week”, presented on the Lido at the opening of Critics’ Week. We see Baptiste, a thirty-year-old in a relationship with a woman, discover the Parisian world of drag queens and fall in love with one of them, Cookie.
Refusing voyeurism, Florent Gouëlou, himself a drag queen, wanted “to make a declaration of love for this form of art by taking the point of view of someone who discovers it”. “Through the character of Cookie, you also see my own experience as a ‘drag'”, he told the presentation of the film alongside his actors.
This edition of the Mostra therefore marks a new step forward in the representation in cinema of the diversity of gender identities. Last year, the release of the film “A good man”, with Noémie Merlant in the body of a man who becomes “pregnant”, also went in this direction.
In 2020, it was Sébastien Lifshitz, already him, who contributed to this movement with the documentary “Little Girl”, on the journey of young Sasha, born in a boy’s body and expressing her trans identity.