{"id":4405,"date":"2014-02-14T00:37:40","date_gmt":"2014-02-14T05:37:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/smugfilm.com\/?p=4405"},"modified":"2014-02-14T00:37:40","modified_gmt":"2014-02-14T05:37:40","slug":"tomboy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/tomboy\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Tomboy’: Quietly Reinventing The Spy Genre"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"tomboypic\"
\n

\nTomboy<\/a> (2011)
\n<\/b><\/span><\/b>Written and Directed by C\u00e9line Sciamma
\n82 min.<\/p>\n

Spoiler-free.<\/i><\/p>\n

Say what you want about Netflix Instant man, but there\u2019s gold to be found on there if you really look. Sure, their catalogue is padded to the rafters with 1-star stuff, and you\u2019re lucky if you\u2019re able to find more than one movie a week that is truly up your alley. But, if you take random chances here and there, clicking around and trying a few minutes of a lot of different things in a row, sometimes you\u2019ll find something that you never in a million years would have assumed you\u2019d dig, but is so the goddamn movie for you it\u2019s ridiculous. Such was the case with this one, for me.
\n
\nI figured Tomboy<\/a> for one of those glorified After School Specials that Liberals seem to blindly love\u2014the kind of movies that get heralded as being \u2018powerful\u2019 and \u2018important\u2019 simply for making the \u2018daring\u2019 point that discrimination\/racism\/sexism\/etcetera exists. To hate on one of these movies for being poorly made is to be \u2018insensitive\u2019, or worse, \u2018part of the problem\u2019. Don\u2019t get me wrong\u2014the other side of the aisle certainly has their own version of this: movies that are awful, yet have tons of 5-star reviews on Amazon simply because the protagonists are good Christian folk and there\u2019s no cursing. But I digress. The point is, Tomboy is not<\/i> one of these eye-roll inducing, non-movies. It\u2019s a real movie. Hell, it\u2019s a goddamn suspense film<\/i>\u2014the best one I\u2019ve seen in ages.<\/p>\n

Fuck The Bourne Identity<\/a>, and Taken<\/a>, and the rest of those suspense, spy, thriller whatevers of the last however many years. All that shakycam-ing and cutting and whatnot\u2014none of that shit has anything to do with suspense. Suspense is Michael Haneke<\/a>. Suspense is Chantal Akerman<\/a>. Suspense is the Dardenne brothers<\/a>. Alright, that last example doesn\u2019t exactly fit, because the Dardennes do <\/i>employ shakycam somewhat, but it\u2019s the best damn shakycam you\u2019ve ever seen in your life. Every shot, though shaky, is great, and every cut is great. Makes mumblecore look like a camera rolling down a mountain of boring people. Not that it doesn\u2019t already look like that, of course. But, once again, I am digressing.<\/p>\n

Tomboy definitely fits into that latter school of suspense\u2014deliberate shots, real-seeming people, lived-in settings, slow burn. But more than that, it\u2019s essentially a spy story. Our protagonist is a 10-year-old girl who wants to be seen as a boy by her group of friends, and is afraid that if they find out she is really a girl, they will shun her\u2014or worse. I felt more for this girl than I did for the protagonist of any spy movie I\u2019ve ever seen in my life. This shit makes The Departed<\/a> look like nothing. Which isn\u2019t to say that this movie is \u2018brutal\u2019 or graphic or whatever\u2014it isn\u2019t, and it doesn\u2019t need to be. The stakes are plenty high with just the looming threat of being exposed and the close calls along the way.<\/p>\n

So many movies try to put you in the shoes of its main character, but only great ones are able to accomplish this. It\u2019s an extraordinarily difficult feat. Making the audience forget they\u2019re watching a movie, and forget the actors are acting, is already hard enough. To be able to, on top of that, convince them that the protagonist’s pain is their<\/i> pain as well? That\u2019s fucking hypnotism. That\u2019s some next level, voodoo doll shit. And Tomboy does this perfectly. The thought of this poor girl being found out becomes the thought of us<\/i> being found out, even if we, in our own lives, have nothing to hide\u2014because it\u2019s the thought of our beautiful soul being shown to, and judged by, an unwelcoming, uncomprehending, un-understanding mob of beasts.<\/p>\n

\u201cListen, what\u2019s the most horrible experience you can imagine? To me\u2014it\u2019s being left, unarmed, in a sealed cell with a drooling beast of prey or a maniac who\u2019s had some disease that\u2019s eaten his brain out. You\u2019d have nothing then but your voice\u2014your voice and your thought. You\u2019d scream to that creature why it should not touch you, you\u2019d have the most eloquent words, the unanswerable words, you\u2019d become the vessel of absolute truth. And you\u2019d see living eyes watching you and you\u2019d know that the thing can\u2019t hear you, that it can\u2019t be reached, not reached, not in any way, yet it\u2019s breathing and moving there with a purpose of its own. That\u2019s horror.\u201d<\/p>\n

–\u00a0 Ayn Rand\u2019s The Fountainhead<\/a> (p. 331)<\/p>\n

You don\u2019t need to be someone confused about their sexuality, or about what gender they feel best as, to thoroughly enjoy and relate to this movie. This movie is about the human experience of individuality, and having to hide it, for your safety, amidst a tribe. Ayn Rand woulda loved this thing. And how beautiful is that? A feminist movie (on paper, at least) that literally anyone can get behind\u2014even someone who abhorred the idea of feminism.<\/p>\n

4 1\/2 out of 5 Codys.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\"tomboypic\"
\n

\nTomboy<\/a> (2011)
\n<\/b><\/span><\/b>Written and Directed by C\u00e9line Sciamma
\n82 min.<\/p>\n

Spoiler-free.<\/i><\/p>\n

Say what you want about Netflix Instant man, but there\u2019s gold to be found on there if you really look. Sure, their catalogue is padded to the rafters with 1-star stuff, and you\u2019re lucky if you\u2019re able to find more than one movie a week that is truly up your alley. But, if you take random chances here and there, clicking around and trying a few minutes of a lot of different things in a row, sometimes you\u2019ll find something that you never in a million years would have assumed you\u2019d dig, but is so the goddamn movie for you it\u2019s ridiculous. Such was the case with this one, for me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,1],"tags":[32,104,185,3520,3521],"class_list":["post-4405","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-allposts","category-codysreviews","tag-cody-clarke","tag-smug-film-2","tag-smugfilm","tag-tomboy-movie","tag-tomboy-review"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4405","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4405"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4405\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4408,"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4405\/revisions\/4408"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4405"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4405"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/smugfilm.com\/oldsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4405"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}