So here I am, back in the theater for 2012 and what do I see first?  One of Hollywood’s big January openers?  Maybe an Oscar Nominated Holdover™?  Nope, since now I’m going to see whatever I want to see and not force myself to go spend hard earned money on whatever happens to be playing, I went into the city to check out an art house foreign flick!

I’m not normally one for French films, though. I find them far too often point blank about their message without any sense of wonder or mystery.  Sadly, that’s somewhat the case here as well as Tomboy only has a running time of 82 minutes.  It’s just enough movie to tell you exactly what they want to say, and then cut to credits.  I found that terribly disappointing since I was having a rather nice time in the immensely tiny balcony screen at The Plaza on Ponce.  It’s the kind of place that shows Rocky Horror with a live cast every Friday night at midnight and I was very pleased to pay them a mere 15 dollars for two tickets.  It wasn’t even matinee pricing and could have been two dollars less if I’d paid cash.

But anyway, back to the movie about a little girl who desires strongly to be a boy.

Tomboy doesn’t make a guessing game out of Laure’s sex.  Pretty soon after we’re introduce to her and the family, she and her little sister are enjoying happy fun time in a bath together.  Sure enough, as most foreign films are apt to do, it makes no apologies for showing life as it is, and we get an absolute confirmation that Laure is biologically female.  So really the story is about the relationships around her concerning the gender identification.  In this vein, most of the time is spent following her during the last weeks of summer as she’s adjusting to moving to a new apartment building and making friends.

Laure introduces herself to the kids her age as Michael, and because she not only looks the part with short cropped hair, undeveloped chest, and a boylike charm, they accept this version of her.  Along the way, she picks up new tactics to keep the illusion going like spitting, playing rough at games, and eventually crafting a penis out of Play-Dough to stuff her Speedo.  It works like a charm, and she is incredibly happy.  But, of course, we’re all being set up to have the carpet yanked out from under us.

The problem with Tomboy is that’s all there really is to the plot.  While you could forge some more questions out of the motivations behind her mother so cruelly forcing a dress on her.  Or delve a bit deeper on what happens when Michael begins kindling a childish romance with another girl Lisa.  There isn’t much time spent on that sort of thing.  So for all the great acting given by many kid actors, there is a huge hole that fills the space that is left when the motion picture does indeed drop off to credits.  And there really isn’t any amount of heavy handed product placement pasta that can fill that gap.