Review of Tomboy (2011) by Johnny T — 20 Nov 2012

The startling power of Tomboy, a beautiful, matter-of-fact French drama about a young girl who wants to be a boy - and for one singular summer around her 10th birthday passes as one - begins with the one-of-a-kind natural performance by Zoé Héran as Laure. Tomboy is one of those little big films whose simplicity and concision suggest the excess of meaning that language (cinematic or otherwise) could never account for. Tomboy is tender and affectionate. It shows us Laure/Mikael in an adventure that may be forgotten in adulthood or may form her adulthood. Writer-director Celine Sciamma breaks little ground here, but her story is nicely scaled to the gender-rigid world of childhood, where boys playing soccer together take as much pride in their spitting skills as any scored goal. It's so much fun that as Tomboy moves toward its conclusion, the inevitable end of Héran's days as Mikael feels like watching someone die. Tomboy astutely explores the freedom, however brief, of being untethered to the highly rule-bound world of gender codes.

VERDICT: "High-Quality Stuff" - [Positive Reaction] This is a rating to a movie I view as very entertaining and well made, and definitely worth paying the full price at a theatre to see or own on DVD. It is not perfect, but it is definitely excellent. (Films that are rated 3.5 or 4 stars).