Alain Berliner’s debut feature film Ma vie en rose (My Life in Pink, 1997) is celebrated for its tender depiction of transgender childhood. It tells the story of a trans girl, Ludovic (Georges Du Fresne), the youngest child of Pierre and Hanna Fabre (Jean-Philippe Écoffey and Michèle Laroque), a typical French couple. Though assigned male at birth, “Ludo” has begun to openly identify as female when the film starts by publicly donning a dress and heels. Her family is bewildered. Yet, Ludo responds to them with impressive whimsy, confidence and care. In one poignant scene, Pierre angrily explodes at the dinner table in response to Ludo’s display of femininity. He rushes out of the house and begins doing pull-ups on the children’s jungle gym – as if to preserve his virility and prove he can raise masculine sons. In response, Ludo calmly follows him outside and gently takes his hand in hers. This gesture temporarily softens Pierre – in that moment, his insecurity is no match for the sweet affection of his more self-assured child.
Patience with Ludo’s open transition is short lived, however. When Ludo announces that she plans to marry her classmate Jérôme (Julien Rivière), who happens to be the son of Pierre’s new boss, the Fabres panic. Hanna cuts off Ludo’s silky neck-length hair and then sends her to therapy with the intent of gender conversion. Ludovic tries to appease her parents. At Pierre’s urging, she unconvincingly performs hallmarks of masculinity by playing soccer and grabbing her crotch. She even attempts to kiss a young girl, who only pushes her off and giggles, “I don’t kiss girls.” In her guilt and isolation, Ludo’s fortitude tragically wavers – and the colors drain from the film, turning icy blue.
Berliner cuts through these painful misunderstandings by firmly establishing Ludovic’s critical point of view. Low angle shots make the world of adults big and, at times, overwhelming – but also comically conventional. Berliner satirizes the Fabres’ French suburban lives. The houses look the same; the cars look the same. The whole neighborhood thoughtlessly rehearses acceptable behavior, particularly when it comes to gender attire and gender roles. There are several close-up shots of men wearing frumpy pants and sloppy button-down shirts and women wearing too-tight dresses, trying to balance on heels. Wives defer to their husbands who casually throw their weight around.
In contrast, Ludo has high-angle, doll-house reveries in which she lives as a glamorous girl, wearing perfectly tailored pink dresses, dancing to the electro-pop sound of Dominique Dalcan. In one such vignette, Ludo rationalizes that her gender assignment is one big mishap. As she sees it, when she was being created, her other X chromosome fell into a trashcan by accident and was mistakenly replaced with a Y. By the end of the film, Ludovic finds that she has been right all along, that similar mishaps have been made with other children.
When popular trans actress and producer Zackary Drucker first watched Ma vie en rose, she felt that her “story was on the screen because I was that little boy who wanted to be a girl and nobody understood and nobody knew what to do with me.” The film feels authentic to audiences, in part, because it reflects the childhood experiences of its writer, Chris vander Stappen who was assigned female at birth but wanted to be a boy when she was growing up.
According to historian Jules Gill-Peterson, the United States is now witnessing, “the single largest historical attack on trans people” by panicked policymakers. In such a moment as this, Ludovic’s story offers an alternative worldview, one which could free everyone – not just trans people – from the rigid constraints of gender assignment.
