Trans ballet dancer Nora Monsecour on Girl: ‘There was always a fascination with what was between my legs’ Eleanor Halls
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/films/0/trans-ballet-dancer-nora-monsecour-girl-always-fascination-legs/
When Nora Monsecour was 15 and training as a transgender ballerina in Belgium, she decided to join the womens’ pointe class. But her school wouldn’t let her.
Monsecour was transitioning. Having taken puberty blockers at the age of 11, she was halfway through her female hormone replacements, with her sights set on gender reassignment surgery.
And yet, her school principal told Monsecour that she was “going through a phase”. Worse still, the principal blamed Monsecour’s mother, saying she was giving her daughter medication because she’d always wanted a daughter over a son.
Later that year, in 2009, Monsecour left the school. Her story made headlines, prompting aspiring Flemish film director Lukas Dhont, who was only 18, to send her a Facebook message. He wanted to make a documentary about Monsecour’s life. She said no.
A few years later, Dhont asked again, and this time Monsecour reconsidered. If the film was a fictionalised account of her life, rather than a documentary, she would do it. The result was Girl, out now in cinemas, starring 27-year-old breakout actor Victor Polster, a student at the Royal Ballet School of Antwerp, as 15-year-old transgender ballerina Lara.
We find Lara, supported by her loving father Matthias (Arieh Worthalter), at the beginning of both the transitioning process and an unforgiving career in dance. As in Darren Aronofsky’s brilliant Black Swan, which revolves around a deadly rivalry between two female ballet dancers, the stage becomes a metaphor for societal ideals.
This is a world that trades only in fairy tales, fit for princes and princesses and nothing in between. “The dance world is a very visual, emotional environment, and so very attractive to a film maker,” says Dhont. “And, importantly, it is all about physical manipulation.”
Both Lara’s external and internal desires, dance and female identity, run destructively parallel to each other, with her body at the centre of both. The greater her self-disgust, the harder she trains, pushing her body to gruesome extremes. In one scene, Lara takes off her pointe shoes to reveal bloody, bruised feet. In the next – a scene based on Monsecour’s own experience – she winces while un-taping her genitals, a habit so damaging it leads to severe infection. As Lara’s body collapses, unable to perform in line with her vision of perfection, her mental health unravels, resulting in a tragic denouement.
Dhont’s debut feature film was met with a standing ovation at Cannes, won the festival’s Camera D’or, Best First Feature Film and Queer Palm awards, and picked up a Golden Globe nomination for Best Foreign Film. Roma director Alfonso Cuarón even came to watch it with his son, and Dhont and Monsecour were inundated with letters from trans viewers thanking them for making a film that made sense of their experiences.
After Girl’s initial period of success, however, controversy began to take hold. Trans critics called the film voyeuristic, exploitative and “trauma porn”. Issue was taken with Polster’s casting as a non-transgender actor, as well as the camera’s unwavering focus on Lara’s genitals, slammed as a “cisgender gaze”.
Particularly divisive was one of the film’s final scenes, in which Lara attempts to cut off her penis with a pair of scissors. “I think the criticism around the film is necessary,” says Monsecour, who collaborated extensively with Dhont throughout casting and filming. “But I think maybe the issue was that, when the film came out, it wasn’t clear that I was involved. Because I didn’t feel ready to link my name to the film.”
She says the scene was based on personal experience. “I’ve found myself with razors in my hands on many occasions,” she says. “I’ve never encountered someone who has cut off their genitals. But a lot of transgender people commit suicide. And this is a metaphor for suicide.” While the scene is gruesome and heavy to watch, Dhont says it was one of the easiest scenes to film. “Well it was so mechanical, so choreographed, and Victor is with his back to the camera.”
Dhont also defends the camera’s focus on Lara’s groin. “All the scenes that focused on the body came directly from Nora,” he says. “And anyway, cinema is [a] voyeur. As a filmmaker, as an audience, you’ve entered someone’s life. Everything you see is personal.” This focus also feels essential: Lara’s genitals are a betrayal of her identity. And if, at times, the lens becomes a voyeur, it’s a pointed reflection of a world that sees her as a curio.
“There was always a fascination with what was between my legs,” says Monsecour. “Friends wouldn’t accept me in their bedrooms.” One of the film’s most powerful scenes has Lara’s classmates corner her into lifting up her dress. The scene is distressingly long and uncomfortably naturalistic, and, according to Dhont, the trickiest scene to film. We watch Lara refuse quietly countless times, the camera unflinching, until she obliges, forcing the viewer into perverse alliance with shame-faced peers who do nothing to intervene.
In another scene, Lara’s school teacher asks the class to raise their hands if they feel uncomfortable sharing a changing room with Lara. “This actually happened to me,” says Monsecour, who also took no issue with the fact that Lara was played by a non-transgender actor. She and Dhont held an open casting-call for over 500 people, and were wary of casting a transitioning transgender actor who would be at a vulnerable time of their lives – a period they might regret having immortalised on screen.
“I appreciate why people spoke up about it,” says Monsecour. “But unlike in Hollywood, where it’s different because there are a lot of talented trans actors, and money and status get in the way, it was much harder for us. And we needed someone who could dance. I never cared whether the actor was trans or gay, I just wanted someone who could play Lara.”
Dhont adds: “It’s interesting that people want to categorise Victor. Because in a way, that’s what this film is about. About categories and boxes. I see gender as performative. And Victor’s performance shows that you can channel the gender you are not, whenever you want.”
Both Dhont and Monsecour remain sanguine about the criticism. “There is a danger,” says Dhont, “in mixing activism and art. There is a radicalism, and aggression, and extremism in the way we react to each other that I really don’t like.”
Dhont made sure to reply to every critic who took issue with his film, even Skyping one in particular.
“I wanted them to understand that this wasn’t the portrait of a trans community,” says Dhont. “This film was about one moment. One life. One girl.”
Comments are closed.
