Battling to be herself, to be a ballerina: Girl, a film by Lukas Dhont

David Mead

“I don’t want to be an ‘example’. I want to be a girl.” The emotional words of Lara, the determined 15-year old central figure of Lukas Dhont’s film, Girl. Committed to becoming a ballet dancer and on probation at Belgium’s top ballet schools, she throws herself into her studies. All the usual challenges and frustrations of professional dance training and being a teenager not only surface quickly, but are magnified dramatically, for Lara was born a boy and is now preparing for gender reassignment surgery as she undergoes the process of making the transition from male to female.

As in the 2000 British hit Billy Elliot, ballet in Girl is really a vehicle for a story about gender and someone trying to find and express their true selves. Both films also involve struggle. In Billy Elliot, the young Billy has to battle his father, who in turn is busy fighting the Miners’ Strike. In Girl, a film of significantly more psychological depth, Lara’s struggles are largely with herself as she attempts to come to terms with what she feels and who she wants to be, however.

Inspired by true story of dancer Nora Monsecour, who advised closely, Dhont’s film is a beautifully shot transgender portrait. Lara’s story is told with great sensitivity. I found it deeply engaging and did not want to look away for a second.

Filming was mostly done with hand-held cameras, allowing us to see everything up-close. The dance scenes in the ballet studio are especially well done. Frank van den Eeden’s cinematography takes us right into the midst of the action. The sound of point shoes on the floor, the concentration, the pressure, the competition – and it’s made very clear to the students they are competing for places in the cast for a show – are all there. It also gives a very good sense of just how hard, physically and mentally, ballet training is.

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The film has provoked criticism from some in transgender community for Dhont’s not using a trans actor instead. That raises all sorts of wider questions about whether only someone with direct experience of what is being portrayed can or should play a particular role. It’s a dangerous argument that closes more doors than it opens.

Right from the beginning when we see Lara looking int a mirror, in itself a reflection of us looking at her, attention keeps coming back to the body: in her bedroom, in the bathroom, in the studio, in the shower. No secret is made of her tucking and taping to hide her still masculine features, and the nasty red marks as she peels it off. It is undoubtedly disturbing but I disagree that it is somehow exploitive rather than representative. The physicality is certainly not erotic or fetishized in any way. In some ways it can even be said to reflect ballet’s own obsession with aesthetic and image.

Victor Polster gives a truly captivating performance in the lead role, bringing Lara to life in a way that respects the issues raised. He lets us see Lara as she sees herself: different, not what she wants to be, yet at least. A student at Antwerp’s Royal Ballet School, Polster actually auditioned for one of the other roles but made such an impact he was offered the lead. As Lara, his face is often full of calm. He speaks gently.

Yet underneath, you soon start to see that all is not well. Lara flicks between joy and despair at a moment’s notice. When something hurts, we see and feel it. But we also see how the little things bring happiness such as when, delivering her brother to his school gate, his teacher asks Lara if she is his sister. Her smile is radiant. The pace of change is slower than Lara would like and she pushes herself to the limit, harming her body in the process. Badly bloodied toes, are only part of her problems.

Girl emphasises tolerance, even if it’s sometime clumsy as in a moment early on at school when she is asked to close her eyes while the teacher asks the other girls to raise their hand if they have a problem with Lara using the girls’ changing room. Non-one does. But it’s not that simple, because Lara clearly does, using a toilet to get changed and refusing to shower in front of the others until almost bullied into doing so.

A harsher scene comes at a sleepover for some of the female students at the school. Any mask the host’s mother has is stripped away as she shows Lara where she will sleep. “This is your room. The girls sleep in the other room.” Not, you notice, ‘the other girls’. It gets worse. Previously tolerant if not overtly supportive (they never ask Lara how she is), the other girls turn on Lara demanding to see her crotch and taping. ‘You’ve seen us naked’, they explain by way of justification. Hardly surprisingly, once it’s over, Lara flees.

Unusually, only on a couple of occasions is there anything but support for Lara. That makes them all the more hard-hitting when they do come. The first occurs when, attempting to dress her very reluctant young brother, he calls her by her original name. The effect is like a dagger plunged into the heart. She tells him not ever to use that name again, but one senses the damage is done.

Not surprisingly, we see Lara struggle with pointework, for which she gets individual tuition in an attempt to catch up. One person who does not hold back with her comments is Lara’s demanding pointework coach, played by the real-life Belgian choreographer Marie-Louise Wilderijckx. She does believe and encourage. “You’re not going to give up, are you?” she demands as the teary young dancer slips and falls again. Yet you can’t help wonder if remarks like, “There are some things we can’t change,” made about Lara’s feet, hit deeper than imagined and make her push herself harder than is good for her.

Away from her battles with pointe shoes, the film regularly comes back to Lara’s relationship with her single-parent father, Mathias (Arieh Woltholter). The chemistry between the two is incredibly real. He is supportive but worried too. As Lara pushes herself to near self-destruction, his doubts clearly increase. The changes she is going through puts a strain on their relationship.

About halfway through, one senses that it may not all end well. Lara wants to be a ‘complete’ girl so badly. You feel terribly for her. But she’s scared. In the end, physical issues magnified by what else is going on mean she is taken out of the big school performance. She sits and watches from the audience. That, it is suggested, is the final straw that makes her take matters into her own hands and speed things up.

At the time, the penultimate scene and her self-harm came as a shock. Looking back, I really should have seen it coming. Lara had driven herself to the point where, for her, it was the only way. There is still time for a final moment of real optimism for the future, though, as we see Lara striding confidently along a busy subway.

And what of Nora Monsecour, on record as saying that she recognised herself very closely in the film? “My story is not a fantasy of the cis director. Lara’s story is my story… it has a message of courage, bravery and passion,” she said in an interview. She had much more opposition and teachers who struggled with the whole idea of transgender, let alone just in ballet. She moved away from ballet to study contemporary dance, including at the Northern School of Contemporary Dance in Leeds. She’s now with tanzmainz, the dance company of the Staatstheater Mainz, Germany.

Girl is sometimes jarring, sometimes discomforting. It does provide a window on the trans experience but more than anything it’s a powerful picture of a vulnerable teenager coming to terms with themself, struggling reconcile who they feel they are, their inner identity, with their physical appearance, or at least what they perceive that appearance to be. What really carries it is the sheer intensity of Polster’s performance, though. The film was nominated for a Best Foreign Film Golden Globe and won the Camera d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. It’s easy to see why.

Girl
Director: Lukas Dhont
Producers: Menuet
Running Time: 105 minutes
Rating: 15
Nov available on DVD