XXY is an emotionally subtle, completely enthralling Argentine movie with a subject that may both attract and repel a potential audience: the teenage protagonist, Alex, has been raised as a girl, but was born with both male and female genitalia. She and her family face the possibility of “corrective” surgery — and the also alarming (for her parents) possibility that she may prefer to live her life as a man. The film takes place during one poignant and crucial weekend of this fragile period.
Never clinical, by turns wryly funny and deeply moving, XXY is best when it concentrates on Alex (Ines Efron) and a visiting teenage boy (Martín Piroyansky) and their changing reactions to each other. Their relationship takes some sharply surprising twists and turns – I guarantee that you won’t guess where the film is headed.
Some of the plot elements (the boy is the son of a plastic surgeon evaluating Alex without her advance knowledge; Alex’s father saves sea turtles whose fins have been mutilated by boats) are less subtle and more contrived than the characters and the performances. The setting, a fishing village on the Uruguayan seacoast, is unusual and lovely. The ending hits just the right bittersweet note. The film, novelist and screenwriter Lucía Puenzo’s directorial debut, deserves to find a wide audience.
Moving Midway is a marvelous documentary that ranges far beyond its nominal subject – the literal moving, on wheels, of an historic plantation home away from suburban creep into a more rural area – into aspects of history and sociology, family and friendship. Director Godfrey Cheshire revisits Midway, the North Carolina plantation home where he spent several childhood summers, and begins a very personal, discursive look at The Plantation, in myth (think Gone with the Wind) and reality, at race, and at his own relatives, not all of whom come off favorably. Along the way he discovers an African-American cousin, the descendant of slaves owned by his great-grandfather (who slept with a cook), and they strike up a really moving friendship. Technically adequate but far from slick, the movie reaches audiences on multiple levels, and is both thought-provoking and smashingly entertaining.
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