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Boys Don't Cry (1999) Like many based-on-a-true-story movies - and most of them are unhappy
pictures that end in court or the morgue - this has the feel of a car
accident in slow motion, putting the audience in the position of a helpless
spectator as a situation gets out of control and a central character
rushes towards doom. Here, the real-life model is Brandon Teena, aka
Teena Brandon, a girl who underwent a 'crisis of sexual identity' and
passed for a boy - codifying her identity as male rather than transgendered
or lesbian - finding a centredeness as a guy she didn't have as a foul-up
misift girl. Brandon (Hilary Swank, in a remarkable performance) is
especially popular with girls because she is better at being a gentleman
than the midwestern redneck guys whom she hangs about with and enters
into a sincere relationship with straight Chloe Sevigny that nevertheless
inevitably pays off in tragedy as the 'imposture' is exposed and a small
knot of guys turn on her, raping and eventually murdering her not so
much out of homophobia as resentment at being outmanned and deceived.
It alternates sweetly lyrical in the fragile love scenes, which are
remarkably frank about the processes of sexual impersonation, and the
horrific, with the outbursts of violence paying off on a suspenseful
build-up and the central violation - the rape, of course, not the murder
- an especially upsetting sequence, as much for the casualness of the
thugs who feel themselves justified as for the hero/heroine's sufferings,
while the climactic killing is as confused and messy, with collateral
victims and mixed intentions between the two killers. What is indicted
here is a want of empathy that runs deep - director Kimberley Peirce
can be accused of demonising the attitudes of poor white trash men while
their young women are madonnas (Sevigny's mother, however, is resolutely
bigoted, perhaps because she flirted so heavily with Brandon), though
this is more the story of an idyll inevitably broken than an indictment
of the bigots. Swank commands attention with a remarkably subtle performance
that rarely takes the easy out, showing how Brandon's intransigence
and commitment to a make-over identity inevitably contributes to her
fate. First published in this form here. Visit Kim's Official Website at www.johnnyalucard.com
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