The 52: A Fantastic Woman

 From June 2023 to June 2024 I'll be watching a lgbtqia+ film each week and coming back here with my thoughts, feelings and plenty of hopes we aren't met with the "kill your gays" trope. I call this The 52.

TW: Transphobia/hate crimes/assult

For the first… 15-30 minutes I was pretty certain this was a wonderful film about a terrible trans experience.

Image credit: Wikipedia

But no. It’s just a really terrible film that shows some of the worst things trans people experience with no real meaning to it, other than to make some (cis) people think “aw, that sucks” 

It is painful, scene after scene showcasing for no reason at all an array of awful experiences, a film that seems to say “what would life look like if the very worst happened to you at every opportunity”. There is no justice, there is no… no meaning. And sometimes there is no meaning in cruelty, but here it isn’t even true in that respect: here this is pointless tragedy to alienate and differentiate a trans story from the cis audience it is destined for.

And then there’s a scene where Marina goes undercover in the mens section of a sauna, putting herself in danger for literally no reason. She could have handed the key over, been escorted to the locker she needed by the staff, but instead the film decided to put a trans woman into a situation that every transphobe loves to imagine and it felt cruel and unnecessary and brutal, watching Marina strip down and pretend to be a man for nothing at all.

A Beautiful Woman is not a good film. It is not a nice film or a well done film. It is… unmistakably acted wonderfully, the work XX does is something unique and passionate, but it is a cruel film, a film made not for the community it supposedly represents but to “other” that community, make their pain palatable for an audience who will walk away with misconceptions and no guilt whatsoever.

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