MA VIE EN ROSE (MY LIFE IN PINK)

MA VIE EN ROSE (MY LIFE IN PINK) is an endearing, but curious film from Belgium. The movie starts out with a robust bash at which newly moved-in Pierre (Jean Philippe Ecoffey) and wife, Hanna (Michele Laroque), introduce themselves to their neighbors in a charming suburb. All bodes well, as Pierre presents his daughter and three sons to the assembled neighbors, except that their youngest child, Ludovic (Georges Du Fresne), appears dressed in girl’s apparel. His mother reprimands him and then lovingly hugs him anyway, dismissing his boyhood fascination with girlish things as a childish fantasy. However, Ludovic’s fantasy doesn’t go away.

“We’re going to marry each other when I’m no longer a boy,” he says, dewy-eyed, to the boy next door as he walks across the lawn with him, arm in arm. In subsequent scenes, Ludovic endures the obligatory teasing and peer harassment from fellow schoolmates when he pulls out a pair of dolls during classroom show-and-tell and dresses in a skirt in class. For a boy, Ludovic entertains very strange fantasies. In several dream sequences, a buxom blonde woman fairy pours pixy dust on a mythical, manufactured landscape, where a romantic Barbie doll-look-alike, named Pam, lives in Elysian bliss with a romantic Ken look-alike, named Ben. Instead of playing trucks or soccer with the boys, Ludovic spends hours seated on a bus bench, gazing at the Pam and Ben poster across the street, while dreaming make-believe stories about married bliss.

Although his mother, Hanna, tries to cajole him out of his girlish fantasies, he insists that he is a girl and wants to play with dolls like the girls do. His mother gets upset and forbids him to pretend that he is a girl, but he evades his mother’s reproofs, preferring girlish romantic fantasies to boyish toys. At the psychologist’s, the mother reluctantly admits that she and Pierre wanted a girl when she was pregnant with Ludovic to complement their two boys and one girl family. However, the psychologist doesn’t offer any solutions; she only offers more questions. Pierre talks with Albert, his next-door neighbor boss, and father of the boy whom Ludovic says he wants to marry. Albert counsels him to spend more time with his son. He does, to no avail. The crisis comes as Ludovic disguises himself as the Snow White in the school play whom the next-door neighbor boy is supposed to kiss awake onstage. Outraged, the other parents ostracize the gender dysphoric boy and his family, and the headmaster throws Ludovic out of school for his strange behavior. Publicly humiliated, the parents leave their neighborhood for another city, where Pierre finds another job, and the family can come to terms with Ludovic’s peculiar problems.

As Ludovic, Georges Du Fresne does a remarkable job of portraying the dewy-eyed naif who pretends he is a girl, even in potentially embarrassing scenes where he impersonates Snow White in a school play. Michele LaRoque plays Ludovic’s mother, Hanna, with telling maternal concern and sensitivity to her son’s predicament. Jean-Philippe Ecoffey acquits the role of Ludovic’s father with straightforward masculine impatience with Ludovic’s problems. With an apparently low budget, Director Berliner did the best he could with limited resources, but Ludovic’s dream sequences appeared contrived at best, and shabby at worst.

For all its quirkiness, Golden Globe-Award nominated MA VIE EN ROSE (MY LIFE IN PINK) deals with a rare emotional disorder, called gender dysphoria, which afflicts a small segment of the population, who are dissatisfied with their birth gender. Because of its subtitles, most mainstream US audiences may find the movie obscure, and uninteresting. However, for those who crave ever more abstruse fare, especially homosexuals who want rationale for their aberrant behavior, MA VIE EN ROSE has a certain appeal.

The problem with it is that the family makes no recourse to God or to the power of His healing touch. So what if Pierre and Hanna wished for a girl instead of a boy, and the young man acts like a female? God can change gender confusion, gender dysphoria and all the other sexual perversions which resulted from the fall, including the overactive lusts so prominent in Hollywood entertainment. What may be impossible to the humanistic psychologist is possible with God (Matthew 19:26).