Thesis On A Domestication

Shortly after this film premièred at the Chicago Film Festival, a trans woman won a major acting award for the first time. Increasingly, trans roles are played by trans people. One of the big frustrations expressed during the preceding years, when studios would claim that there just wasn’t enough trans talent, came from the fact that practically every trans person learns to act to some extent. In a transphobic society, it’s a survival skill.

In Argentina, Camila Sosa Villada carved out a successful acting career for herself well ahead of her peers, and also became a celebrated writer. Her novel, Tesis Sobre Una Domesticación, forms the basis of this film, which also centres on an actress – unnamed – played by Barbie Di Rocco. This woman’s transness is not especially relevant to what she’s doing with her career, at least now that she’s established, but it does play an important role in the narrative insofar as it offers a distinctive angle from which to explore the performance of femininity and the tension that almost all women experience between fitting into the social roles they are offered and being true to themselves.

We meet her mid-career, when she’s commencing an affair with a lawyer (Alfonso Herrera) which seems too intense to last but gradually morphs into something resilient. We follow her forwards in time as this begins to reshape her life, at the first time as exploring her past by way of the occasional flashback and her mother’s recollections. She is a forceful, fiery character throughout, and yet, at different times, life demands different performances from her. As a teenager, she struggles because she doesn’t know how to play a boy. In middle age, she struggles because, having fought to live freely as herself, she is required to live in the role of a respectable middle class woman, not least because she and her partner want to adopt. Meanwhile, at work, she is offered two new roles: that of Pasiphae, which she feels she’s now too old for, and that of a transvestite mother, which comes with baggage of its own.

There is another kind of pressure at work here. Our heroine’s childhood was undoubtedly hard, and yet there’s a suggestion that, as she found her power, she enjoyed being seen as transgressive, as exciting. We see hints of this in the way that she expresses her sexuality now, in polyamory and in bdsm, and the way that her lovers view her as exciting and somewhat scandalous because of her sensuality and confidence. Beyond transition and beyond sexual spaces, however, she is consumed by the conventions of womanhood. In an early scene in which she and a colleague watch, with delight, an older man expressing himself through dance, she gets in trouble for breaking a no smoking rule. It’s a small hint of things to come: the discovery that, having defied one set of parameters, she is constrained within new ones.

Presenting a counterpoint to this is the boy whom she hopes to adopt. His life is constrained by the rituals required to manage chronic illness. He does not expect freedom, and requires encouragement even to engage in play. He is eager to move into the role of her son, and his fears stem from his experience of instability, of the failure of adult promises. Both of them need to find balance and ways of reconciling with these difficulties, even as they identify and resent the different options available to others.

Far from delivering dry moral pondering, the film is stunningly shot and full of sensual imagery, with numerous erotic scenes. In one, the heroine and the lawyer shimmy around their apartment together to the strains of Tina Turner’s Private Dancer, looking for love, for something real, despite the imbalances of power and potential. Elsewhere, more than once, we see her stagger offstage, striving to separate herself from an emotionally exhausting role, to find a space in which she can become herself again – if any such space exists.