Falling for Innocence: Transchild Freedom vs.

Adult Judgment
in Tomboy and Ma vie en rose

Brian Gibson

Children's Literature, Volume 44, 2016, pp. 219-237 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/chl.2016.0001

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/619583

No institutional affiliation (10 Sep 2018 05:50 GMT)

Falling for Innocence: Transchild Freedom vs.
Adult Judgment in Tomboy and Ma vie en rose
Brian Gibson

The overarching framework for French writer-director Céline Sciam-

ma’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 sensibil-
ity—etched out over 82 minutes by cinematographer Crystel Fournier
and Sciamma with careful framing, poetically-fragmented and respect-
ful 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

Children’s Literature 44, Hollins University © 2016. 219

220 Brian Gibson

Laure, aka Mikael (Zoé Héran), in Tomboy (image courtesy of Hold-Up Films, copyright
2011).

way. It so emphasizes and valorizes Laure’s righteous, even Edenic in-

nocence, in direct opposition to her3 mother’s scolding judgment and
angry intolerance, that Tomboy muddles its formal ambiguity with its
narrative simplicity. The film becomes far more intent on establishing
the superiority of “natural,” unfettered, pure childhood4 over bigoted,
impure adulthood than on exploring the burgeoning transgender of
its young protagonist. In an overly programmatic visual explication of
Maurice Sendak’s contention that, as Nat Hurley puts it, in childhood’s
“terrifying unsettling power for the adult . . . [t]he child looks forward
. . . the adult looks back” (“Childhood and Its Discontents” 9), Sciamma
fetishizes and glorifies the child as forward-thinking and transgressive—
the true “trans” of the film—without truly making the child rebellious,
while reducing the adult to backwardness and the reactionary. This
seemingly liberal, twenty-first-century work simply reflects the current
Western sociocultural fetishization of childhood as an innocent world
ultimately and tragically violated by adults and adulthood. By so starkly
positioning itself as a film about a young girl’s freedom to identify as
male, oppressed and rejected by her gender-conforming mother, Tom-
boy furthers the false dichotomy between child and adult, as if they are
two separate, unrelated states. In simplifying and romanticizing the
fluidity of gender with its transchild, Tomboy widens the supposed gulf
between childhood and adulthood, as if it is impossible to bridge or
Transchild Freedom vs. Adult Judgment in Tomboy and Ma vie en rose 221

transcend. And yet this work, made by adults, remains doubly accusatory
of adults—of the mother within the film and, beyond the screen, of any
of those adult viewers who are not on Laure’s side—even as it relies on
them to recognize and feel for its protagonist’s plight. “Child” becomes
here the most gilt-edged label in contemporary identity politics, with
Laure a mere marker of transgressive, idealized desire that can only
be recognized, prized, and turned into a self-liberating identity by us,
the adult viewers who should think and know better.

Mom-Boy and Nature’s Child

Bigoted adulthood is associated with the maternal and feminine

throughout Tomboy, as if unnecessarily further justifying Laure’s deci-
sion to pass as a boy—a woman’s authority is wielded harshly against
tomboyism and so the girl-boy has all the more reason to avoid becom-
ing a woman. The child’s sense of gender is that it is pliable, for her to
reshape, much like the plasticine phallus she makes to put in her swim
shorts; her mother’s gender-normative attitude, by simplistic contrast,
is cruelly hard and inflexible. Throughout, her father (Mathieu Demy)
is the parent with whom Laure feels most free; as he sits with Laure
after the revelation that she has, once again, been passing as a boy,
he never reproves her but says, “Don’t blame mum, you know.” This
gentle admonition, particularly after a first viewing, seems directed
more at us. For it is the gender-conforming mother (Sophie Cattani),
never named but defined by her parental authority, who is the first to
resex Laure when she is the first to call her by her birth name—soon
after Laure calls herself “Mikael” on meeting Lisa (Jeanne Disson), the
leader of a group of kids, framing herself as male for the viewer—com-
manding, “Laure, get out of the tub!” This is the mother’s first of many
oppressive, restrictive, or reprimanding statements enacted against
a child whom she insists on seeing only as her daughter and no one
else. It is when her child stands up to get out of the tub that we see,
briefly, that she seems to be biologically female. This defining order
by the mother—triply defined as such in the next scene, when her two
daughters gather and she talks about the baby, an already-known and
identified “him,” aligning herself with her unborn son against Laure
after Laure whispers into the pregnant belly and the mother notes, “I
hope he’ll tell me [your secret]”—is one of many Judeo-Christian mo-
ments in the film. In the Bible, naming a child was usually the mother’s
task, and her naming of Laure is a godlike act of adult authority that
222 Brian Gibson

undercuts the ambiguity of her sex and gender just before the film
enters an Edenic free space of undefined childness with the character.
From the opening shot of Laure’s head framed by trees, Sciamma
establishes nature as an idyll in which Laure-as-Mikael is free to be a
child, the gender unimportant. The film is replete with shots of parts
of children’s bodies—often not immediately clear whose, to test our
assumptions of gender and identity—as they run, grab, frolic, jump,
dance, swim, play soccer, jostle, fight, or hug. Tomboy thus tends, as
nineteenth-century Western culture did, to “identif[y] [the child]
directly with motion” (Kincaid, Child-Loving 66) as it establishes the
stereotype of “The Happy Child at Play” (79). (Indoors, Laure and
younger sister Jeanne [Malonn Lévana] are never shown watching
television, playing video games, or using a computer; the apartment
and apartment complex are increasingly associated with the mother and
increasingly opposed to the children’s Edenic free space of nature in
and around the forest.) Mikael’s first meeting with Lisa on the courtyard
path, by a tree, is an Adam-and-Eve moment; the pair’s later dance to
pop music (the chorus to the song, by Para One and Tacteel, is “I love
you always”) offers a sense of romantic, childish abandon as the two
jump and caper and hold hands; the couple’s first kiss comes on a for-
est path, soon after swimming, with the river behind them suggesting
the natural fluidity of gender, sex, and love. Mikael walks through an
arbor (a transitional passageway) to join Lisa’s group of friends as they
all play football5 on a small court, next to the forest, that is bordered on
one side by a grey wall, suggestive of a blank slate, with Mikael starting
over as a boy in this child’s paradise.
Laure’s fall from innocence comes when her mother finds out about
her passing as Mikael (disclosed to her by a mother whose son Laure-as-
Mikael beat up because he was hurting Jeanne). Her mother promptly
associates her maleness with a sense of public shame, redefines it as
false, and accuses her of degrading her younger sister’s innocence in
the process: “Why did you do that? . . . You told everyone you were
a boy? You lied and you dragged your sister into it?” Basically and
severely, Laure’s “[t]omboyism is punished” when her mother learns
of those two acts that often constitute tomboyism taken too far for
adults’ liking: “where and when it appears to be the sign of extreme
male identification, [e.g.,] taking a boy’s name or refusing girl cloth-
ing” (Halberstam, “Oh Bondage Up Yours!” 193). The mother seems
all the more repressive, though, because Laure is not yet a teenager
and “tomboyism [tends to be] tolerated as long as the child remains
Transchild Freedom vs. Adult Judgment in Tomboy and Ma vie en rose 223

prepubescent” (193). After a close-up of the mother angry and cry-

ing, she even slaps Laure in the face; this corporal punishment, more
associated with a pre-children’s-rights era of discipline, recalls the
religion-inflected children’s literature of the 1700s and 1800s, wherein
the child was talked down to, admonished, and threatened with bodily
punishment. (Younger sister Jeanne, meanwhile, is there to look con-
cerned, so even a six-year-old is made to clearly know best or better than
the overreacting, repressive adult.) The next day, such enforced and
explicit restrictions of her child’s efforts at self-identification continue
when the mother makes Laure wear a dress and takes her to the beat-
up boy’s apartment to out her as biologically female to mother and
son; the entire ordeal is obviously deeply humiliating and shaming for
Laure. The mother, in black as if to emphasize her villainy (or mourn-
ing for what her daughter has done), defends herself to her child and,
by extension, to those child-empathizing viewers, by arguing that the
educational system demands gender classification: “School starts in two
weeks [sic] time. We have no choice. We need to tell. I’m not doing
this to hurt you, or to teach you a lesson. I have to, understand?” Such
defensiveness not only feebly links them, as if “we” are in this together,
but flies in the face of both her physical and social aggressiveness (the
slap and her shaming way of dressing and outing her), which obviously
both hurt and made her child an object lesson even as they marked the
mother’s female authority and stamp over her daughter, whom she is
determined to acculturate to heteronormativity. It is the mother who
has obviously “lied” here. Her professed need to be “doing this”—as if
for Laure’s own good, that clichéd adult reasoning of old—bespeaks
an overwhelming necessity to keep a child defined by birth-sex and
assumed gender, a necessity emphasized by the mother’s condition.
She is eight or nine months pregnant and thus further defined by her
maternal desire to see her child as what she was born as. Worse still, she
says, “I don’t mind you playing ‘the boy,’” a claim belied by her initial,
automatic reaction, and then puts tremendous pressure on her child:
“But this can’t go on. Got an idea? Because if you do, say so, but I can’t
think of any. You got a solution?” The ten-year-old, then, who is all but
accused of creating this unnecessary problem, must come up with a
solution or else continue to go along with this adult who demands that
her child reassert her femaleness. The mother’s physical and verbal
language here utterly rejects the film’s imagistic, mostly silent empathy
with the child, its artful ambiguity, and its air of thoughtfulness. After
the mother’s oppressive, didactic control, it is we who must somehow
224 Brian Gibson

try not to “blame mum” in her constant efforts to “know” and fix her
child’s sex and gender as female, even though the film has, all along,
set up the mother to be blamed for the loss of Laure’s serious play as
a boy in Mikael’s newfound and overidealized Eden, a far better home
away from home.
Laure’s Edenic space for becoming and being Mikael is corrupted
after her mother makes her confess her supposed imposture—the wall-
paper’s tree pattern behind Laure and the beat-up boy is pathetically,
hollowly reminiscent of the trees outside where Mikael used to frolic,
free from adult sanction or judgment—and then has her visit Lisa and
admit all. When the group of kids with whom she plays learns of Laure’s
passing-as-Mikael, they turn into a wildly naturalizing pack. After chas-
ing her down, making adult-influenced moral judgments, demanding
to check if she is a girl, and telling Lisa to pull down Laure’s shorts, one
of them declares, “If she’s a girl, then you kissed her. That’s disgusting.
It’s not disgusting?”6 Lisa agrees, “Yes, it’s disgusting.” Laure, red-eyed
from crying after having been exposed, sits by the tree, her head in
her hands. But then, back home, after Laure saying that going back
to school is “alright,” she looks out, in an echo of the shot early on,
to see Lisa standing in front of the tree in the courtyard, gazing up at
her. They meet there, rewriting their first, Adam-and-Eve encounter,
though with a greater sense of self-conscious courtship now, as if this
is a meet-cute scene (that “aww!” movie moment when a future couple
meets for the first time) out of heterosexual romances. (It cannot be
seen as a sexually subversive, faintly Sapphic moment, since Laure’s
sexuality is unclear and the pair does not kiss.) Lisa asks again, “What’s
your name?” “My name is Laure,” she says. Laure has awoken to her
true girlness, accepting and asserting her female gender as the natu-
ral one. Here is the internalization of the mother’s didactic, shaming
lesson that she is her daughter, Laure, and she must publicly disavow
any other identity. Laure’s declaration of her parents-given name to
Lisa, her Eve, framed by the free space of nature where she enjoyed
and was developing her maleness, is an adult-forced shattering of her
transchild Eden, a self-proclaimed denial of what she wanted and was
trying to become. The scoring of the credits to that song to which Lisa
and Laure-as-Mikael had danced, “Always,” with its peppy chorus of
“I love you always,” seems even more incongruous in its jarring sense
of cheerful tolerance and devotion—as if Laure has acceded not only
to her mother’s demands but to her way of looking at her and so
(happily?) becomes Laure for good. Thus a film about a girl trying to
Transchild Freedom vs. Adult Judgment in Tomboy and Ma vie en rose 225

become masculine ends in suddenly idealized conformity, ensuring

that the child here—unlike those rebellious or strange kids who make
childhood so queer, as Kathryn Bond Stockton, in The Queer Child, or
Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century, notes—straightens herself
right out. In reducing and returning herself to her birth-sex, Laure
offers only her mother’s truth and a truth of motherhood—that an-
nouncement “It’s a girl”—even as same-sex friendship trumps gender,
the film’s apparent main concern. This nonboy can only chastely, as
a friend, have the girl after confessing her sin and true name to her.
Their past transgressive, in-flux relationship—a girl self-identifying as
a boy being friends with or in love with a girl—is simply supplanted
by a let-us-start-over, prepubescent friendship of imminent classmates,
waiting for the autumnal moment when school, that adult-led institu-
tion of conformity and didacticism, begins.

Making Innocence of It All

The film’s opposition of one child’s artfully ambiguous, implied

gender (and perhaps sex) identity and an adult’s starkly repressive,
explicit female authority so eclipses the initial, ostensible transgender
concern of Tomboy that it becomes clear the film is all about childness,
not one transchild, versus adulthood. In keeping with James Kincaid’s
contention that adult culture fetishizes and contains the “invented
. . . modern child,” Sciamma’s work clearly places Laure, judged by her
mother as an unacceptable Other for trying to pass as a boy, in “another
country, a country we then decided to make exotic and heartbreak-
ingly attractive” (Kincaid, “Dickens and the Construction of the Child”
30). Laure-as-Mikael is the Romantic child, associated with sublime
nature and imbued with “naturalness, innocence, divinity” (32), free
and wild enough in her wilderness to discover her true identity on
her own, beyond adult society’s gaze or control. Liberal-minded adult
viewers are pushed and prodded by the film’s respectful, immersive
aesthetic into siding with Laure-as-Mikael in her natural quest. So we
are appalled when one of our own, and a mother no less, is shown
brutally reining Laure in, dictating her cultural identity to her, and
asserting her adult supremacy of knowledge and will. (Metatheatri-
cally and metacinematically, Laure is also performing as Mikael and
most viewers may be sympathetic to such playacting; the mother seems
like a cruel, antiplay stage manager demanding, “Stop this perfor-
mance!”) In this simplistic enmity, Laure’s transgender desire is actually
226 Brian Gibson

subordinated to her childness—it is the child who has been so idylli-

cally, playfully trans(gressive), while the mother is so brutally, narrowly,
punitively orthodox. The mother’s authoritarianism—her insistence
on disciplining and correcting Laure for her rebellious childness—is
an establishment of her power, a power that confirms the difference
between adult and child. The film becomes merely about childness
because of Sciamma’s insistence on the mother’s relentless, monolithic
power trip. But this power comes from the mother’s insistence on her
daughter’s innocence about gender (and sexuality); Laure must re-
main as she is born. Once again, as Jacqueline Rose explicates in her
seminal work The Case of Peter Pan or The Impossibility of Children’s Fiction,
innocence is clearly “not . . . a property of childhood but . . . a portion
of adult desire” (xii). Sciamma’s film ends as it does because it cannot
criticize the mother’s insistence on Laure’s return to some imagined
purity, innocence, and “born-as-ness” (the mother again simplistically
defined by her motherness), for the film has, all along, been viewing
Laure-as-Mikael through the lens of purity, innocence, and naturalness.
And in its simplistic pitting of adults’ conforming, institutional conven-
tions against children’s superior, individuated, knowing “innocence,”
Tomboy reflects not, ultimately, a refreshingly nonjudgmental notion
of child gender as a freeing playspace but our contemporary Western
culture’s obsession with childhood as an innocent world entirely unto
itself that is ultimately and tragically violated by adults and adulthood.
This “hyperinnocentizing,” if you will, of children trumps the film’s
initial premise and seeming raison d’être (its admirably ambiguous
sense of child gender). “Metaphors of travel and border crossings”
and “border wars” are common in transsexuality narratives (Halber-
stam, Female Masculinity 165), but in Sciamma’s film the liminality of
transchild space is replaced by limitation and retreat—to the absolute,
false-nostalgia-tinged demonization of adults. Childhood, then, remains
“what we pretend is pure and sacrosanct” (Rose 30) even as the adult
invasion of childhood is scapegoated for a loss of innocence (Mikael’s
playmates are transphobic only after the mother has outed Mikael as
Laure).
What makes Tomboy all the more reactionary and regressive in its view
of a transchildhood is that a far more complex and progressive French
film7 about a prepubescent boy wanting to be a girl (a more “threaten-
ing” transchild than a tomboy) came out fourteen years earlier. It is
a work that, in its character’s defiant cross-dressing amid adults and
its blurring of genres, proves far more antinarrative and nonnarra-
Transchild Freedom vs. Adult Judgment in Tomboy and Ma vie en rose 227

tive8 than Sciamma’s European art film, breaking Victoria Flanagan’s

general rule that “male-to-female cross-dressers in children’s literature
and film are much less successful at interrogating gender stereotypes”
(xvii). Ma vie en rose (My Life in Pink), written by Alain Berliner and
Chris Vander Stappen and directed by Berliner, initially mixes a campy
realism with surreal expressions of seven-year-old Ludovic’s (Georges
Du Fresne) desire to be trans—to transform, sometimes magically or
in his imagination, from a boy to a girl. In sharp contrast to the bifur-
cated world of Tomboy—the adult-controlled apartment complex vs. the
children’s play space of the woods—Berliner’s film is set in a suburb
where a child’s dream can blur into neighborhood reality (see Kline
443). Here, nature is modified by culture: the subdivision’s manicured
lawns and tended gardens become brightly colored, child-constructed,
dollhouse-land sets out of a TV show in Ludovic’s flights of fancy. The
TV show’s theme is both the film’s title and recurring song. (In contrast
to the emptily happy song in Tomboy, this song, “Rose,” sung by Zazie
and arranged by Berliner and Dominique Dalcan, is a poppy reworking
of Edith Piaf’s heteroromance number “La vie en rose” to reflect Ludo’s
rosy, I-will-be-female outlook—it includes the lyric “Qu’aimer est toujours
rose [Loving is always pink].”)
In Ma vie en rose, the transchild is defined not by innocence but by
insistence and, from the adults’ point of view, insolence. Early on, the
heteronormative adult world is not quite so straight, or perhaps a little
too stiffly, doll-like straight, because it lurches into camp: brightly made-
up women, adult poses, florid colors, slightly exaggerated marriages,
husbands’ and wives’ ever-so-caricatured emotions. The film also ends
with a comfortingly campy farewell—Ludo’s imagined, blonde Barbie-
like fairy godmother (and TV-show character) Pam flying overhead,
glittering dust streaming from her as she winks. Pam, looking like a
contestant in the Eurovision song contest, remains innocuously campy
and pop-culturally unreal enough that even Ludo’s father imitates her
dance moves. Throughout—as playsets (made of Lego-like material, to
be moved around and rebuilt), models, and dolls, their clothing easily
changed and roles played with, predominate (Ludo is “I play” in Latin,
an apt phrase for this assertive, self-willing boy;9 the family name, “Fab-
re,” suggests fabriqué or “made”)—there is a persistent sense of gender
as flexible, pliable, and changeable. Ludo copes, endures, and defies
because Ludo “deploy[s] imagination in maintenance of his much con-
tested self-image” and learns “that popular [gender] narratives can be
manipulated to private ends” (Schiavi 16), perhaps less consequentially
228 Brian Gibson

because he is a child and thus still coming (out) into his own. Ludo is,
in a campier way than Flanagan credits, a cross-dressing “changeling”
(Garber 84). He appears as Snow White in a play and wears a skirt at a
party—“We’re letting him enact his fantasy, to banalize it,” his parents
rationalize—before, at the end, a boyish girl, “Chris,” trades costumes
with him at another party. Heterosexuality is often stiffly held up as a
model for Ludo, with a teacher saying, as Ludo shows his dolls in class,
“You want to be like Ben, right? You and Sophie [a classmate who just
showed her dolls] would make a pretty couple.” Ludo’s mother asks
him, “Don’t you want to be like your brothers and father?” Yet Ludo
sees that gendered behavior can be not only imposed but, doll-like, can
be posed and reposed; he tries to act male by imitating a cowboy and
he sees two fathers going, ridiculously, face-to-face in an argument on
the street, but he always feels a true “affinity for women” (Norton 430),
dancing with them at a party, living with his grandmother, and seeing
Pam as his guardian angel. He escapes into his own imaginative space
where he is free to wear pink dresses, marry a boy, and any forbidding
adults are kept out. This space nestles the film snugly among the fantasy
escapes of canonical children’s literature, from the Alice, Peter Pan
(with its own complex history of cross-dressing; see Garber 165–85),
and Oz books to the Narnia series and Where The Wild Things Are, “in
which the protagonist’s lack of social power is compensated for by her
[sic] imaginative ability to transform hirself [sic] freely, through hir
[sic] own agency . . . and to fly away, escaping the constraints of hir [sic]
condition, to a marvelous alternative world” (Norton 428). At the same
time, Ludo’s desire to be female is metaphorized, through the Snow
White story, as a dormant desire, his true self waiting to be awakened:
“Ludo’s core identity must ‘die’ and be covered by playacting a male
role until he is old enough to come out of his ‘coffin’ and assume that
identity” (Kline 448). Transchild Laure’s transness, though, is never
linked to any cultural narrative beyond her but always folded back into
her innocent childness.
Unlike the nearly pubescent Laure, whose long-term desires are
left unclear by Sciamma, the seven-year-old Ludovic is sure that he will
become a she; his first appearance before us as viewers and many of the
adults in the film is a self-outing—in a pink dress at a party to which
the neighbors have come to welcome his family. Ludo is certain of his
girl identity and identification with the feminine; he even declares
(with the French feminine article “une” giving greater emphasis to his
pronouncement), “Je suis une garçon-fille [I am a boy-girl].” It is the at-
Transchild Freedom vs. Adult Judgment in Tomboy and Ma vie en rose 229

titude of adults around him that remains uncertain, overly infantile,

and must change. Even his mother Hanna’s (Michèle Laroque) initial
disciplining of Ludo is flecked with doubt, qualification, and humor;
right after declaring, “you’ll be a boy for the rest of your life!” she
notes their similarity: “You’re stubborn. Just like your mother.” Ludo’s
father Pierre (Jean-Philippe Coffey) is repeatedly angry with Ludo but
his own masculinity becomes drunkenly, pathetically unmoored when
he loses his job. The film, while more psychorealist after its first half-
hour—the parents fighting; increased pressure on Ludo to act the boy;
classmates’ parents and families turning on the Fabres; homophobic
graffiti on their garage door; Ludo bullied and ostracized until, after his
mother angrily cuts his hair, he moves in with his grandmother—further
questions gender roles by examining Ludo’s parents’ marriage, from
half-drunk, half-angry Pierre, just laid off, looking through his home’s
patio door and curtains as if they are bars, to half-crazed Hanna playing
the wanton and kissing her husband’s ex-boss to make his wife jealous.
Pierre prefaces a lecture with the self-serving point that Ludo cross-
dressed in front of his boss’s son, Jérôme (a point that makes the father
seem foolish, even puerile); afterwards, the father calms down when
Ludo takes him back into the house—the child quietly leads. The family
feels pushed by heteronormative conformity—their near-hysterically
straight-laced suburb, with the father’s boss at the centre of things—to
“fix” Ludo. Medical (taking him to a psychologist—“That’ll fix it, I
swear,” the father tells his boss) and religious discourse (Jérôme must
move away from Ludo in class or “I’ll go to hell”) infect the language
of those around Ludo. Legal discourse also seeps into the conversation:
after Ludo’s first time with the psychologist, Ludo is told by his father
that he is a boy and then, back home, he looks out the window to see
kids playing, one saying, “Stop in the name of the law!”
Laure’s cross-dressing as Mikael, though, is not associated with any
deeper or greater insistence on being seen as transgender or actually
becoming a boy.10 In Tomboy, Laure’s Edenic space collapses, after her
confrontations with her mother, into a hermetically sealed punishment,
outside pop-culture influence or role models and devoid of medical,
religious, or legal discourse. In Ma vie en rose, though, Ludo is always
part of the world—his “highly artificial neighbourhood is satirized as
a failed utopia” (Kline 446)—but Ludo also learns that “people don’t
really believe in difference [between truth and lies, or fidelity and in-
fidelity]” and so “gender difference is just one more arbitrary cultural
sign” yet “so feared that it remains the one difference that must be
230 Brian Gibson

maintained at all costs by the community” (446). There is no sense

of communal or social pressure weighing on Laure in Tomboy; all the
opposition is located in one individual—Laure’s mother (who raises
the specter of school starting soon).
With Laure reductively redefined as the defiant child, she is never
defined by language, only by her external actions, while Ludo is a much
more inward, imaginative child (he escapes into fanciful visions and
fantasies, especially after his grandmother explains that she closes her
eyes and “the world is how I want it”), his play enabling and furthering
his complex, active defiance. When Laure’s supposed female role model
intentionally reins her in, a curtailment that the film goes along with
in the end, it is because Laure, outed after beating up a boy, is not just
being transgressive, but far too trans- and unthinkingly aggressive—too
wild in her supplanting of her birth-sex with a different gender iden-
tity—in her cross-dressing, which is what her mother prefers to see it
as (a dress-up game gone too far, not a repeated effort to adopt and
maintain a new gender identity). When on its own or among her sister
or other children, Laure’s play can be seen as considered, thoughtful
work—the work of imitating typically masculine gestures, mannerisms,
and movements; the work of becoming masculine; the work of being
perceived as masculine by others—but her play is framed only by her
mother as serious, immoral, and harmful (to the family, to Laure herself
in school, and to the mother’s treatment of Laure as a girl).
But with the title Tomboy (the same for the French release, though the
word does not exist in French), Sciamma initially makes Laure out to
be merely a boy-like girl (the French term garcon manqué—“failed/wan-
nabe [both senses apply] boy”—would have better set up the mother
and Laure’s conflict) and places the film in the tradition of children’s
literature about tomboys.11 Such literature essentially dates back to
Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1868–69), where aspiring writer Jo
(her name an act of androgynous self-authorship) laments, “‘It’s bad
enough to be a girl, any-way [sic], when I like boys’ games, and work,
and manners. I can’t get over my disappointment in not being a boy’”
(7); in the sisters’ home dramas, she “played male parts to her heart’s
content” (19). In much tomboy literature, tomboys are associated
with the outdoors or the Wild West, their gender wildness finding free
play in the wilderness (see Abate xv, 97–98), as in Sciamma’s film. But
whereas in most tomboy literature the mother is absent (xviii–xix), the
mother in Tomboy is overdetermined, demanding that Laure admit not
only her birth-sex identity but her identity as daughter, as not-Mikael,
Transchild Freedom vs. Adult Judgment in Tomboy and Ma vie en rose 231

and as a Laure who will be seen and classified by both her peers and
the school system as a girl.12 The adult woman, defined only by her
constant maternity, near-hysterically emphasizes that “tomboy” not only
suggests “‘not like a girl’” but also “not like ‘a mother’” (Elise 140). The
mother’s “‘tomboy taming,’” a common aspect of tomboy literature
(Abate xix–xx), is not done to make Laure a proper lady, prepare her
for adolescence (though the mother may fear that Laure’s passing-as-
Mikael will somehow become permanent with puberty), or even ready
her for marriage or motherhood but simply, it seems, out of a primal
outrage over the social and biological wrongness (or “queerness”?) of
what Laure has tried to act as. Of course, the mother’s discipline and
punishment of Laure for passing as Mikael could reflect the common
concern about tomboys becoming lesbians13 (xxi–xxii). In this light,
the ending, provoked by the staunchly heteronormative mother, where
Lisa and Laure meet beneath the tree but as truth-telling friends now,
erases the possibility of illicit same-sex love, replacing it with honest
same-sex friendship, and is in keeping with many films, from the 1990s
on, where tomboyism has become more “tied to femininity and, perhaps
even more importantly, heterosexuality” (223). Tomboy reacts against
the tomboy figure developed in queer cinema over the past twenty-
five years, with its more “progressive reinvention [of the tomboy] that
embraced more radical gender and sexual characteristics” (232). The
film instead ultimately makes Laure that same old “domestic tomboy
who falls in line at [or, in this case, just before] puberty” (Norton
420). Rather than remain a figure of unclear, fluid, and/or ambigu-
ous gender, Laure has a clear-cut character arc, based on a desired
accomplishment—she is a girl who wants to be taken for a boy—and
the film simply reverses that current in the end, rather than offer
any uncertainty, contradictions, or complexity. Tomboy sides with the
mother in “misconstru[ing] gender identity as a final achievement, a
cohesive, stable system” (Benjamin 70); as in most children’s literature
generally, there is a “purging [of] sexuality . . . to preserve children’s
innocence while nonetheless depicting some form of heterosexuality
as childhood’s desired end” (Pugh 2). The final moments of Tomboy
over-insistently attempt to resolve that “queer tension between inno-
cence and heterosexuality” (15) in so many children’s books—where
innocence is imagined and fetishized as an asexual or presexual state
for children, even as heteronormativity surrounds those children and,
it is assumed, they will adopt it—by re-viewing Laure as Laure, learning
to just be comfortable same-sex friends with Lisa, who no longer wishes
232 Brian Gibson

to kiss her. So tomboyism is separated from childhood innocence,

which is left intact, pure, and that true, “wonderfully fluid play space”
(Zevy 185), with tame, heterosexual-approved same-sex relations ap-
parently restored. But the cyclical sense that Laure has tried to pass
as a boy before, along with all that we have seen pass between Laure
and Lisa, make this ending seem not only more of a passing lie but the
film’s betrayal of itself—an awkward effort to pass off a playful child’s
bending to an adult’s severe will as the respectful, tender reconciliation
between two people that is so typical of many European arthouse films.
Sciamma’s and Berliner’s works, made by adults, necessarily define
the child by adult terms, but the former imposes a clearly adult art-
film aesthetic on Tomboy while, in the latter, “it is Ludo’s worldview that
informs the film’s narrative and aesthetic structures” (Schiavi 13). In a
surreal scene at the end, Ludo’s “worldview” even transforms his mother
when she sees his fantasy world for a moment. In the two films that Ju-
dith Halberstam examines in In a Queer Time and Place, “the transgender
character also seems to stand for a different form of temporality” (77),
but in Tomboy Mikael occupies the same “where”—the same place and
time—as the Laure she is forced to become again, whereas in Ma vie
en rose Ludo’s “elsewhere” (77) is not future but surreally present and
changes his mother (after entering into his Pam-world briefly, she is
more accepting of Ludo).
At the end of Ma vie en rose, which adroitly cross-dresses itself in a
number of genre outfits—camp fantasy, suburban satire, surreal fairy
tale, psychorealist “coming-out” drama—Ludo’s mother and father tell
Ludo that he/she will always be “notre enfant [our child]”; here, “child”
means a younger individual (notably unnamed and ungendered) to be
accepted, not controlled or possessed, whatever their gender desire.
Rather than obsessing over a child’s threatened innocence, Berliner’s
film is about the insistently questing and questioning child, defined by
gender curiosity and gender desire. “Child” is, ultimately, tenderly and
tentatively re-learned and re-viewed by Ludo’s own parents (pushed and
changed by Ludo’s independent, insistent actions and willpower) as a
capacious, generous term, encompassing and acknowledging, first and
foremost, the child’s own desires as his or her own and not the parents’;
Ludo “remains his own uncategorizable self” (Schiavi 12). In Tomboy,
though, “child” is so innocence-bound and limited that the film, along
with the mother, ultimately defines the child entirely in opposition to
or by the female adult’s perception of her, thereby ignoring the child’s
own desires and non-adult sense of self entirely (certainly Sciamma’s
Transchild Freedom vs. Adult Judgment in Tomboy and Ma vie en rose 233

film proves Flanagan’s contention that “male [children] cross-dressing

films are more conservative” [xviii]). “Visibility . . . may be equated with
jeopardy, danger, and exposure” (Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place
78) in queer films and so it is, though only on a basic plot level (Laure’s
biological sex detected by her friends after her mother is apprised of
her dressing-up as a boy), in the transcinema of Tomboy. There is no
clever use of “ghosting” techniques that undo “cinematic time” (78);
instead, Laure is revealed early on to be biologically female and her
transgenderness is undone by film’s end so that she returns to what her
mother pronounced her to be at the moment that she emerged from
the womblike bathtub. She is isolated as a transgressive child—never
truly a transgender child or a child in transition or in transit or in the
midst of transformation—with an adult finally erasing her transness
and establishing her control over her as a merely rebellious, willful
child. The ghost of Tomboy is its illusory subject of transgender when it
is actually a film always pivoting on a child’s attempt at independence
vs. adult authority. Laure is not even, as in many films about transgen-
der, a “transgender subject [punished] for his or her inflexibilities”
(Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place 92), but a child punished
for her transgressions, perhaps because Sciamma’s Tomboy does not
truly wish to wade into the fluidities and fluxes of child gender and
sexuality. The daughter is made into her mother’s image and shaped
by her mother’s demand, but that is all passed off to us, even after
Laure’s insistent, free, and happy-being-Mikael stage, as somehow an
acceptable, even satisfying new status quo, because Laure remains the
simplest of contemporary identity-politics labels, the blankly innocent
child, stuck in opposition to the corrupt and/or compromised adult
world. Thus Tomboy remains a film artfully detached from children and
uninterested in any reading of children, or any reading of itself as a
children’s film, as “wonderfully perverse” (Hurley, “The Perversions
of Children’s Literature” 119). The film’s founding on innocence,
rather than transgender, proves its foundering—innocence was what
made wild Laure-as-Mikael so potent; innocence cannot now be yoked
to heteronormativity. Innocence can be made, in its opposition to
sexuality, as Tison Pugh puts it, “a perversion of heterosexuality” (18),
but in Tomboy, where Laure-as-Mikael always seems carefully removed
from sexuality or, at most, a passive receiver of sexual desire (when Lisa
kisses Mikael), innocence always means the erasure of sexuality and the
preservation of some (imagined) pure and whole child self, because if
childness can be maintained, sexuality can be staved off altogether. Our
234 Brian Gibson

hazy definition of childhood (falsely) ends with puberty, as the fluid

state ends with the eruption of menstrual or sexual fluids (Kincaid,
Child-Loving 70). Asexual or presexual childhood innocence is thus
itself the (sexualized?) object of desire, a “fetishized belief . . . a virtue
above all others” (Pugh 18), likely because, as Kincaid puts it, “we have,
slowly but certainly, agreed on a collective illusion that the child is a
biological [and not institutional or cultural or social] category. . . . The
child, we have come to feel, is defined biologically [and], even better,
sexually (or non-sexually)” (Child-Loving 69). Laure, who acts innocent
of the supposed wrongness of transgender in her passing as Mikael, is
made to act well aware of her counterfeit acting by her mother and to
act the born girl to Lisa, as her mother demands. But such innocence,
often “a ‘virtue’ of inaction” (Pugh 161), is really being maintained
and re-established by Laure not acting of her own free will but at her
mother’s dictates. Laure becomes, essentially, inactive—simply falling
back on her given name, sex, and gender, with femininity now an ut-
terly passive role to accept and fall back into—and nonsexual, as in
the final moments of Tomboy, which unfold beneath the unnatural
towers of the apartment block, away from the woods where Mikael
had once been so free to be himself. The joyful, nonsexual innocence
of Laure-as-Mikael, endorsed throughout most of the film, is left to
merely thought-provoke and be supplanted by the urgently enforced
nonsexual innocence of Laure-being-Laure-again, posited by the end
of this hazily liberal, bourgeois European art film as an acceptable,
even socially satisfying new role. Innocence, above all, remains; Laure’s
gender and self-betrayal seem far less important. And so Laure’s own
selfhood and true desires are eclipsed by yet another adult cultural
work’s need to supremely sanctify child-innocence.

Notes

My thanks to Ashlea Hegedus-Viola for discussing Tomboy with me and for her staunch
support.
1
Given my ensuing arguments against seeing Tomboy as a truly progressive film about
transgender, children’s gender identity, or transgressive children, some ancillary ques-
tions about the film’s accolades and their possible relation to a simplistic identity politics
are worth considering. Were some of the awards and praise for Tomboy because some
adult viewers still want to see a LGBTQ or nonheteronormative film as about fighting
against—being opposed by heteronormative society—rather than a film being queer and
transgressive on its own, without a heteronorm to be set against, inimically or in mere
opposition? Does the setting of such a typical plot within a children’s film make it all the
more immediately affecting, moving, and/or tragic for viewers? Did Sciamma’s film garner
much liberal-minded praise because, within the safer, more innocent-seeming frame of a
realistic child’s “experience,” its subject counters, however feebly, mainstream culture’s
Transchild Freedom vs. Adult Judgment in Tomboy and Ma vie en rose 235

persistent “belie[f] that masculinity in girls and women is abhorrent and pathological”
(Halberstam, Female Masculinity 268) and so seems a fundamentally decent, honorable
worthy little film (like its protagonist)?
2
The story’s deliberations and deliberateness are at odds with the film’s production,
a quick and small affair: the idea was floated in March 2010; the screenplay was written
in April; casting was done and half the finances (the final budget was about €1 million
[~$1.4 million US]) secured in May; the shoot, with a crew of fewer than a dozen, took
place in August; postproduction took ten weeks (Lepastier 56–57).
3
It is never clear if Laure is passing as a boy because she: wishes to act as and be so-
cially accepted as a boy, wishes to physically become a boy, wishes to no longer be seen
or treated as a girl, wishes to no longer physically be a girl, or any combination of these
desires. I refer to the character as “Laure” or “she” or the like throughout because she
is seen as such by her mother and at home and more generally (as she does not succeed
in being seen as Mikael). In keeping with Victoria Flanagan’s point that “transgender”
is an adult, political term defining a political identity (6), I use “transgender” (which
better suggests, argues Judith Halberstam [In a Queer Time and Place 53–54], the fluidity
and undefinability of gender identity) and “transchild” for that reason—to reiterate that
the films discussed here are films about children made by adults and, mainly, for adult
audiences (far more adults than children have seen Ma vie en rose and Tomboy). Cinema
has, generally, seen a shift “away from children as the recipients of adult culture to adults
as producers [and filmmakers] of children’s culture” (Wojcik-Andrews 46).
4
Such pure childhood is mirrored in form, with the scant dialogue and the focus
on children’s movements striving for aesthetic purity—the film is closer to pure image
and sound and thus a time (the medium’s infancy) before cinema became cluttered
with speech. Tomboy’s mode of presenting childhood thus ensures, all the more, that
“[c]hildhood is seen as the place where an older form of culture is preserved” (Rose 50).
5
In Ma vie en rose (1997), though, football is not shown as a way to fit in and be with
other children but as a confusing imposition on the transchild by the heteronormativity-
insistent father; the game is shown from above, looking down, reflecting Ludo’s sense
of confusion and uncertainty about the blur of bodies and the point of the game, which
seems fairly silly. Ludo is dressed up in the team uniform, but there is no real organiza-
tion or logic or sense to all the exertions of legs and hectic efforts to kick the ball. The
entire show only makes desperate sense to the expectant, pressuring father, eagerly
looking on and exhorting his son to exhibit and prove his masculinity on the field of
play; instead, Ludo appears “on the soccer field [as] a collection of parts on the verge
of masculine breakdown” (Schiavi 10).
6
My translation, as the English translation for the subtitles is not comprehensive in
this instance.
7
Ma vie en rose was shot in France and primarily a French production, with most of its
actors French and speaking in French, although, for its submission to the Academy Awards
and in presentation abroad, it was classified as Belgian, perhaps in large part because
Alain Berliner is Belgian. Notoriously, as several critics noted, the film was slapped with
an “R” rating by the Motion Picture Association of America for “brief strong language,”
though it contains just one expletive; many assumed that the censors found the subject
matter offensive (the MPAA typically censures sex and sexuality more than violence).
8
For more on the ways in which Ma vie en rose opposes films’ usual male and hetero-
normative narrativity, see Schiavi 1–8, 13–19.
9
Ludo’s name also suggests, “as Judith Butler would argue, he must be ludique [sic],
always at play in an impersonation and an approximation of a gender role” (Kline 448).
I refer to Ludo as male or with male pronouns because, in the film, his wish to become
a girl, especially physically, is not yet fully realized.
10
Indeed, Tomboy does not allow for any subtextual fluidity; unlike how “[g]ender
metamorphosis in [The Crying Game and Boys Don’t Cry] is also used as a metaphor for
236 Brian Gibson

other kinds of mobility or immobility” (Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place 77), Laure’s
transness is never framed as or allowed the possibility of being seen as a metaphor for
any other kinds of transness or fluidity.
11
“Tomboy,” with its combination of Tom, a common male name, and boy, overstates
that the girl in question is not male but simultaneously suggests that one needs little more
than a superficial linguistic rechristening for a girl to seem like a boy. Laure’s renaming
of herself as Mikael, then, as with Josephine rechristening herself Jo in Alcott’s famous
novel, is the adoption of a new title in order to change others’ perception of her—out-
ward trappings (name, clothes, hair, etc.) remake the man and unmake the woman. This
sense of acting-the-biological-part as simultaneously exposing and masking the instability
of gender can be seen in “boy” as a verb, which, as Garber notes, meant, in the sense
of “‘boy’ on stage . . . before the Restoration . . . ‘to represent (a woman’s part)’” (89).
12
The mother’s oppressive emphasis on school as the system for which Laure will have
to return to her proper birth-sex may stem, at least in part, from mainstream French
society’s institutional sense of “normal”: “In French the association [of ‘normal’ with
‘certified, approved, as meeting a set of normative standards’] remains strong, and when
one speaks of normalization, one refers to the whole process of training, testing, and
authorizing people as full members of society” (Warner 56). Laure’s natural embracing of
herself as Mikael, amid nature (the woods and river), perhaps disturbingly blurs natural
and normal all the more for the mother; in terms of sexuality, Kincaid notes, “natural”
was replaced by “normal” in nineteenth-century discourse about the subject (Child-Loving
137). At the start of Ma vie en rose, Ludo’s mother laughs off his first appearance as a girl
by saying, in an effort to self-convince, “C’est normale.”
13
See Judith Halberstam, “Oh Bondage Up Yours! Female Masculinity and the Tom-
boy,” in Sissies and Tomboys: Gender Nonconformity and Homosexual Childhood, 153–79, for
more on scientific and cultural concerns, in the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s, about tomboyism
leading to adult lesbianism.

Works Cited

Abate, Michelle Ann. Tomboys: A Literary and Cultural History. Philadelphia: Temple UP,
2008. Print.
Alcott, Louisa May. Little Women. 1868–69. Ed. Valerie Alderson. New York: Oxford UP,
1998. 2nd ed. Print.
Benjamin, Jessica. Like Subjects, Love Objects: Essays on Recognition and Sexual Difference.
New Haven: Yale UP, 1995. Print.
Costa, Diego. “Film Review: Tomboy [sic].” Slant Magazine. 14 Nov. 2011. n.p. Web. 25
Jan. 2014.
Elise, Dianne. “Tomboys and Cowgirls: The Girl’s Disidentification from the Mother.”
Sissies and Tomboys: Gender Nonconformity and Homosexual Childhood. Ed. Matthew
Rottnek. New York: New York UP, 1999. 140–52. Print.
Flanagan, Victoria. Into the Closet: Cross-Dressing and the Gendered Body in Children’s Literature
and Film. New York: Routledge, 2008. Print.
Garber, Marjorie. Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety. New York: Routledge,
1992. Print.
Halberstam, Judith. Female Masculinity. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1998. Print.
———. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. New York: New
York UP, 2005. Print.
———. “Oh Bondage Up Yours!: Female Masculinity and the Tomboy.” 1999. Curiouser:
On the Queerness of Children. Ed. Steven Bruhm and Natasha Hurley. Minneapolis: U
of Minnesota P, 2004. 191–214. Print.
Hurley, Nat. “Childhood and Its Discontents: An Introduction.” English Studies in Canada
38.3–4 (2012): 1–24. Print.
Transchild Freedom vs. Adult Judgment in Tomboy and Ma vie en rose 237

———. “The Perversions of Children’s Literature.” Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures
3.2 (2011): 118–32. Print.
Kincaid, James. Child-Loving: The Erotic Child and Victorian Culture. New York: Routledge,
1992. Print.
———. “Dickens and the Construction of the Child.” Dickens and the Children of Empire.
Ed. Wendy S. Jacobson. New York: Palgrave, 2000. 29–42. Print.
Kline, T. Jefferson. “Alain Berliner’s Ma Vie en Rose [sic] (1997): Crossing Dress, Crossing
Boundaries.” Gender and Psychoanalysis 3.4 (1998): 435–49. Print.
Lepastier, Joachim. “L’enfance d’un film [A film’s infancy].” Cahiers du Cinéma 664
(February 2011): 56–57. Print.
Ma vie en rose [My Life in Pink]. Dir. Alain Berliner. Perf. Georges Du Fresne, Michèle
Laroque, and Jean-Philippe Écoffey. 1997. Sony Pictures Classics, 1999. DVD.
Norton, Jody. “Transchildren and the Discipline of Children’s Literature.” The Lion and
the Unicorn 23.3 (1999): 415–36. Print.
Pugh, Tison. Innocence, Heterosexuality, and the Queerness of Children’s Literature. New York:
Routledge, 2010. Print.
Rose, Jacqueline. The Case of Peter Pan or The Impossibility of Children’s Fiction. 1984. Phila-
delphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1993. Print.
Schiavi, Michael R. “A ‘Girlboy’s’ Own Story: Non-Masculine Narrativity in Ma Vie en Rose
[sic].” College Literature 31.3 (2004): 1–26. Print.
Tomboy. Dir. Céline Sciamma. Perf. Zoé Héran, Malonn Lévana, Jeanne Disson, and
Sophie Cattani. 2011. Wolfe Video, 2012. DVD.
Warner, Michael. The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life. Cam-
bridge: Harvard UP, 1999. Print.
Wojcik-Andrews, Ian. Children’s Films: History, Ideology, Pedagogy, Theory. New York: Gar-
land, 2000. Print.
Zevy, Lee. “Sexing the Tomboy.” Sissies and Tomboys: Gender Nonconformity and Homosexual
Childhood. Ed. Matthew Rottnek. New York: New York UP, 1999. 180–95. Print.