First Take: As Sushmita Sen is geared up to play Gauri Sawant, here's a look at transgenders in movies

With Sushmita Sen all set to play transgender Gauri Sawant, the debate on whether a heterosexual can play a transgender or not, has been reopened.

If we look at Akshay Kumar in Laxmii we would have to conclude that  all non-transgenders  should keep away from trans parts. The film does nothing for humanity, and that includes the transgender community, which Akshay claims to  have “normalized” by playing a transgender in Laxmii.

No doubt, Akshay is a fine actor. But if he really wants to see actors normalize the transgender community, he must watch Eddie Redmayne in  The Danish Girl, Vijay Sethupathi in  Super Deluxe and Riddhi Sen in Nagarkirtan.

When Riddhi played a transgender in Nagarkirtan and won the National award for his  performance, he told me, “I studied the mannerisms and graces of my mother, who is my greatest influence, and my girlfriend. I imbibed their personality and made sure I didn’t  mimic them. I never thought of  the impact that the character would make or that I’d win a National award for it. One doesn’t do a role after assessing its influence. One does it because it’s there waiting to be brought alive.”

Whom did Akshay observe before playing the third sex? Whom do you have the time to observe when you do 3-4 films per year?

If the transgender community is really happy with how it has been portrayed by Akshay, why has the celebrity transgender Laxmi Narayan Tripathi, who was so vocal about the film before its release, gone quiet after what she must have seen when the film began streaming? Breaking all records, sure. Of decency, good taste and sensitivity.

Has Akshay seen Eddie Redmayne in the Danish Girl? I am sure he has not. Eddie in The Danish Girl plays a man who would rather be a woman. The performance needed a wealth of internalization so that it didn’t appear caricaturish or worse, garish in totality. Redmayne’s practice of getting into stockings and stilettos is so scrupulous and the transformation from man to woman so complete that viewers all over the world were asking…is he gay??

Eddie’s part is subtle and non-aggressive. He is not strutting his stuff even when he is strutting his stuff.

Watching first-time actor Victor Polster nailing the role of a young transgender in Belgian  director Lukas Dhont’s Girl, I would have never guessed that Polster is not a trans-gender  himself. Yes, he is THAT good! And then some more. Some spoilsport critics have objected to a non-trans playing one. By that logic, only serial killers, rapists and anarchists should play these roles. It’s all about acting, in case some finicky critics have forgotten. And Polster as  Lara is a revelation. The first-time director Lukas Dhont’s leaves nothing to the imagination. The film has graphic scenes of genital exposure and self-violence, so harsh and brutal they could disturb you for a lifetime.

Life is not easy for a man moving into the other gender. As I saw the palpable pain of the  transitional protagonist, I was reminded my dear friend Rituparno Ghosh, who went through a similar, far more painful man-to-woman surgical process. It finally took his life. Lara survives. She has an astonishing support system, which Rituparno never had.

One of the many delights of watching this masterpiece about gender migration is to see the transitional  transgender’s relationship with her father Mathias(played by an excellent Belgian  actor Arieh Worthalter). The father’s patience and compassion see Lara through to the other side. There is a scene of father-and-daughter snuggled up in bed with the father exhorting Lara by reminding her of what an example she is to the trans-gender community.

“But I don’t want to be an example. I just want to be a  girl,” Lara replies.

Sequences such as the above are overwhelmingly comforting and reassuring in their  normalized tone in an absolutely abnormal situation. Then, there is the cinematography. This is a film that comes from a place of absolute honesty and concern. It is savagely unsparing in  showing us the details of Lara’s emotional and physical pain, her disconnect with the world of the normal around her and her passion for ballet which drives Lara into inhuman levels of arduous practice and self-damage.

Girl is  a marvel of creation, Unlike the  super-heroes of  Marvel, Lara is a  hero  with buildings and  nations  to  protect. This  masterpiece  doesn’t strut its excellence to  win awards. There is  an urgent story waiting to be told  here.  And it is told without fears or frills. As  for macho actors running around in sarees pretending to be  a transgender, do watch Girl. Victor Polster will seriously remind you of  what an actor is supposed to do.

Chilean Director Sebastián Lelio’s  A Fantastic Woman is a penetrating portrait of a transgender woman’s struggle for dignity after her middle-aged lover suddenly dies on her.Marina (played with consummate sensitivity by a real trans Daniela Vega) never quite recovers from the traumatic shock. Neither does the film. It quickly goes downhill from the point of tragedy, building what looks like a shell-shocked narrative in-sync with the stupor that falls over Daniela’s soul after Orlando (Francisco Reyes) passes away.The ensuing trauma of a ‘woman’ who is unacceptable to society for her gender and status in the life of the man she loved, is brought out like a dentist extracting rotten teeth. It is a graceless situation.And director Sebastian Lelio goes with the frown, rendering every crease in Daniela’s disheveled existence in shades of black and fright.Daniela’s dilemma is so in-your-face, it hardly needed to be affirmed so strongly by the narrative. Her humiliation is shown in scenes in the hospital and at the police station. And we know what happens to the mistress specially when she is gender-challenged. But Marina’s behaviour post the tragedy eschews empathy. She frets, fumes, snarls and at one point even jumps on to the car of her deceased lover’s family to bounce up and down.By this point the edgy narrative begins to look uneasily unfocused.Perhaps Marina’s unconventional methods of protest are a cultural thing. Maybe in Chile, the conventions of bereavement are played out at a pitch that seems fairly bizarre to us. Also, the fact that the film is in Spanish makes the dialogue-heavy sequences, such as the one where Marina is confronted by Orlando’s wife in a car basement, seems unnecessarily stretched-out and verbose.

A Fantastic Woman fails to carry us along in its protagonist’s tough journey from bereavement to isolation to confrontation to settlement. Marina can’t wait to get out of it. Neither can we.

Subhash K Jha is a Patna-based film critic who has been writing about Bollywood for long enough to know the industry inside out. He tweets at @SubhashK_Jha.

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