newjerseynewsroom.com

BY MIRIAM RINN

NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM

MOVIE REVIEW

Missing summer already? Celine Sciamma’s “Tomboy” at the Film Forum is as fresh and sweet as a summer morning in childhood, when time stretches out ahead of you and each hour is filled with possibility.

In this gently comic tale of a young girl who decides to be a boy for the last few weeks of summer, it’s not the plot that’s so unusual--we’ve seen cross-gender stories before--but the total lack of moralizing or psychological interpretation. Sciamma keeps the camera on the children, and the extraordinarily natural performances she elicits from them does the rest.

Laure, a boyish-looking 10 year old, moves to a new house in a new town with her little sister Jeanne, her father, and very pregnant mother. Mom has to stay off her feet, so the kids are left to amuse themselves, and they do. Jeanne, as girly a girl as Laure isn’t, adores her older sister, who is warm and affectionate toward her. The sisters bathe together, play together, and occasionally try to hear their soon-to-be-born brother in their mother’s belly. Mom and Dad feel completely natural too, the sort of reasonable, grown-up parents who seem to have disappeared entirely from American film and television.

When Laure wanders outside to meet a neighbor girl, she impulsively introduces herself as Mikael. With her short hair, her boys’ clothes and sneakers, and her rangy build, she’s totally convincing. Lisa introduces Mikael to the local kids, and she easily slips into their pattern of play. She’s an aggressive soccer player and isn’t intimidated by the boys’ roughhousing, so she’s soon accepted as Mikael. She’s stumped for a little while when she’s invited swimming, but soon cuts the top off her swimsuit in a very funny scene and fashions something out of clay to give her a more credible profile.