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One of the stubborn myths attached to LGBTQ persons is the belief that their sexuality or gender identity is the result of social exposure. The subject of Sebastien Lifshitz’s documentary, Little Girl, is 8-year-old Sasha, who was assigned male at birth. However, according to her mother, Sasha already identified as female before she was three, a revelation that certainly challenges the social imprint myth. It is not Lifshitz’s aim to make any kind of analysis of what constitutes transexuality. In fact, his film has no voiceover narration or into-the-camera interviews with experts. It is observational in the clearest sense. We see Sasha and her parents interacting with one another and others in the most everyday ways, and while Sasha is very aware of her status as a transexual child, she never makes much of it. It’s other people who do.

Mainly it’s the people at her school, who have always identified her as a boy since that is what the paperwork says. Sasha lives in a small city in France and her school seems to have some association with conservative Christianity. Sasha’s parents have fully accepted her as a girl and want the school to acknowledge it, but they won’t. Lifshitz doesn’t have much access to the school officials in charge of this decision, so it’s mostly through third-person explanations that we find out, and while Sasha’s mother and father characterize the school’s attitude as hostile, Sasha rarely betrays any disappointment on screen. In fact, to say she’s well-adjusted might be an understatement. She knows why Lifshitz is there and is attentive to both his needs and her own self-image. In a sense, the movie isn’t so much about Sasha as it is a movie being made by Sasha with the help of the director. She performs, in a sense, but because she is still a child the performance is artless. 

Lifshitz avoids the most pressing question, which is how will Sasha navigate adolescence. Since that question is beyond his purview he is free to concentrate on the here and now, and the film’s presence is often startling. Several scenes take place in rooms with medical professionals who aren’t on hand to fix anything but rather sought by Sasha’s parents, who think they might convince the school of Sasha’s identity. The fact that Sasha herself joins in these often technical conversations proves that she already knows exactly who she is. It’s not precociousness, but rather a distinctly childlike sense of harmony with her situation. To put it another way, she’s quite a character.

In French. Now playing in Tokyo at Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551), Shinjuku Musashinokan (03-3354-5670)

Little Girl home page in Japanese

photo (c) Agat Films & CIE – Arte France – Final Cut For real – 2020

In the case of this multinational co-production, the usual opening gambit of claiming that the following story is based on true events for once raises arched eyebrows—at least in hindsight. A cursory internet search yields the intelligence that, in fact, a European artist did once tattoo his work on the back of a man and actually “sold” the artwork to a collector in 2008. The transaction in the movie is a bit more politically fraught, and while the story sells itself as a kind of satire, its thematic proximity to current headlines addressing the ever-changing dynamics in the Middle East keeps you constantly on the alert for any untoward humor you might derive from the action. 

The main thing being satirized is the art world, but unlike The Square, another tongue-in-cheek study of the limits of creativity that was nominated for a foreign film Oscar, The Man Who Sold His Skin finds room for empathy among its cynical set pieces. In a way it has to, because the artwork is a Syrian refugee named Sam Ali (Yahya Mahayni), who has fled his homeland and his fiancee after falling afoul of the government. He not-so-innocently falls into the hands, so to speak, of the Belgian artist Jeffrey Godefroi (Koen De Bouw), who is looking for a “canvas” on which to etch his brilliant conceptual art, a life-size tattoo of the so-called Schengen visa, which allows the holder to travel freely within the European Union, and is thus highly coveted by people trying to escape strife in their native lands. 

The director, Kaouther Ben Hania, has perhaps more fun with this premise than a lot of other filmmakers would ever dare to. Though Sam isn’t treated as a servant or an object by Godefroi, he is obligated to sit half-naked in galleries while patrons ogle his back and make any sort of unfortunate comments they want about his situation while not knowing anything about that situation; which is more complicated than they can imagine. Thanks to the visa on his back, he really can go anywhere in Europe he wants, and thanks to Godefroi, he can live fairly high on the hog (as long as he’s “working”). So while Sam remains a “victim” in the media scheme of things, his material circumstances are those of somebody who has lucked out big time. And for a while, he takes advantage of it to the point where he lords it over the hotel staff and parades around like a peacock when the fancy hits him. When a human rights organization tries to tell him that he’s being exploited at the expense of other refugees, he slams the door in their face.

The difficulty the viewer may have with this clever idea is that they are always waiting for the other shoe to drop, and while in the meantime we can enjoy Godefroi’s hilarious self-importance and the total hypocrisy fueling the “transgressive art” market, there’s the sinking feeling that Sam is headed for a fall or even worse. Ben Hania injects a few brilliantly affecting scenes involving terrorist tropes and long-distance romance, but in the end he has to address the elephant in the other room and opts simply to leave the door ajar. 

In English, Arabic and French. Now playing in Tokyo at Bunkamura Le Cinema Shibuya (03-3477-9264), Human Trust Cinema Yurakucho (03-6259-8608). 

The Man Who Sold His Skin home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2020-Tanit Films-Cinetelefilms-Twenty Twenty Vision-Kwassa Films-Laika Film & Television-Metafora Productions-Film i Vast-Istiqlal Films-A.R.T.-Voo & Be TV

Tales of immigrants making it big in their adopted countries are irresistible, regardless of which side of the political divide you find yourself. Liberals appreciate the idea that new blood invigorates society and thus hold such stories up as examples of how immigration is vital; while conservatives like to point to these individuals as the exceptions that prove the rule, meaning that immigration needs to be tightly controlled. The biography of Cambodian refugee Ted Ngoy is tailor made for this kind of dichotomy, though his tale is so extraordinary that you’d be hard pressed to find any sort of correlative.

Just the results of Ngoy’s enterprising spirit are enough to justify a documentary like this. He arrived in California in the mid-70s with his family after barely escaping the clutches of the Khmer Rouge; started a donut shop from scratch and in a few years had expanded his business to a dozen or so successful stores; became a millionaire in the process; and, most significantly, generated other Cambodian immigrant entrepreneurs through his mentorship. By the 1990s, 80 percent of the donut shops in California were owned by Cambodian immigrants or their children. Of course, the skeptic might wonder what makes donut shops so special, but when Ngoy started out, the market was controlled by either chains, or local mom-and-pop operations whose ambitions never extended beyond one store. And while Ngoy did come up with ideas that seemed to strike a marketable chord—a wider variety of flavors but focus on the classics, pink boxes instead of white ones—the main source of his success was an attitude that treated both customers and employees with respect and gratitude. It’s almost sickening how many tributes the guy draws during the course of the movie. 

Director Alice Gu knows all the clever tricks that documentarists use nowadays to make their movies less stodgy and more like a collection of internet memes—the animated sequences, the wacky montages, the sound bites squooshed up against one another—but while the flow is effortless and the message comes through loud and clear, the dramatic arc feels a bit truncated, because two-thirds of the way through she drops a bomb by saying that Ngoy ended up bankrupt and, for the most part, disgraced. Uncle Ted, as everyone calls him, had personal problems that he could handle until he couldn’t, and Gu never attempts to explain why they happened, only how. It’s as if she didn’t want to participate in this great man’s humiliation, but it seems like such an integral part of this story, if only for its cautionary aspect, that in the end you may feel short-changed. Instead, she fills the final half hour or so with other feel-good stories of Cambodians who took what they needed from Ngoy’s failed empire (he ended up losing everything, including his family) and carried it further. In many ways, The Donut King may be the most American story of the century, but it’s still incomplete.

Now playing in Tokyo at Shinjuku Musashinokan (03-3354-5670).

The Donut King home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2020 TDK Documentary, LLC

The lack of specificity that runs through Alejandro Landes’ free-form film about a group of teenage commandos living in the South American jungle can be seen as its main stylistic purpose. The viewer never finds out why these kids have joined in what is either a political cause or a criminal enterprise, or whether they were somehow forced to join. Nor do we get much in the way of insight into their own feelings about what they’re doing. All we see is their actions and reactions, which often elicit empathy on our part but not enough to sustain any interest in a particular character, all of whom are tagged with disassociating nicknames anyway (Boom Boom, Dog, Rambo, etc.). The obvious similarities to The Lord of the Flies were probably inescapable to Landes, which is why he gets the matter out of the way by including a scene that focuses on a pig’s head, but the differences are more apparent, and more confounding. Without an idea of the larger world that created both this ragtag group of mini-terrorists and their overlords, the movie never taps into anything significant in the viewer’s mind.

Though the kids live by themselves in the jungle they are ostensibly under the thumb of that unseen organization, whose only representative we see is a short, muscular factotum who shows up and perfunctorily puts the kids through various training exercises and then gives them tasks, which they usually mess up. Early on, they’re provided with a cow, a “gift” from a local, presumably sympathetic farmer, and told to take care of it. However, during a drunken party guns are fired and the cow accidentally killed. Though they know they’ll be in trouble (the cow would, theoretically at least, be returned one day to the farmer) they make the most of the situation and butcher the animal. 

However, the troops’ main charge is an American woman, whom they call “professor” (Julianne Nicholson), put under their care after being kidnapped from what sounds like some kind of environmental expedition. At one point the kids try to make a “proof of life” video with mixed results, and as the movie proceeds and the professor’s fate seems up in the air to both her and her captors the pointlessness of it all becomes acute. She gets moved from a mountaintop to a secluded location in the jungle, an order her captors have a great deal of trouble carrying out because of their inherent lack of coordination. 

Monos isn’t really concerned with kids forced into combat, because there is no “war”; or, at least, none that we can see until very late in the movie when Landes throws in a bit of pursuit intrigue and people finally die. In fact, had Landes gone a more conventional route and played up the thriller aspects of an earnest but inept group of adolescents playing at adult games of brutality, he might have ended up with something more revealing than this study in disaffected teenage ennui. The best you can say about Monos is that it’s a gorgeous film about nothing in particular. 

In Spanish and English. Now playing in Tokyo at Theater Image Forum Aoyama (03-5766-0114).

Monos home page in Japanese

photo (c) Stela Cine, Campo, Lemming Film, Pandora, SnowGlobe, Film i Vast, Pando & Mutante Cine