short Frameline reviews, part 2

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The only non-US movie I've seen this year at Frameline: Sworn Virgin, a very moving character study of an Albanian immigrant in Italy who's reinventing himself/herself in tiny steps, after having grown up in a rural community with such strict gender roles that the only safe choice for a woman who didn't want to be married off and didn't want to be limited to "women's work" was to officially become a (celibate) man (a custom that still exists).

Due to the violence transgender people so often face in both fiction and reality, not to mention Italy's less than friendly attitude toward undocumented Albanians, I spent the second half of the movie getting increasingly anxious that something awful would happen to these characters that I'd become so attached to... but this isn't that kind of story; instead, the specter of violence rears its head pretty early on, just enough to establish the character's wish for security at all costs, and then the rest of the movie is a slow, careful release of tension. My other fear was that the story would become all about "hey, being feminine can be fun!", but the protagonist remains too unusual for that— she's almost an alien studying humanity and picking aspects she might or might not want to try out.

Alba Rohrwacher is excellent and so is the rest of the mostly Albanian cast. It's beautifully photographed, moving in a really interesting way back and forth between compositions full of space and detail and closer shots where something significant is happening just out of frame (and, in one especially nice moment, both: when the protagonist first leaves the village, he's framed in medium close-up against a brutally gorgeous mountain/river landscape, and then he seems to start moving across the river while standing still— having stepped onto a ferryboat that we can hear, but haven't yet seen).

Basically, I liked it a whole lot. It's made the rounds in Europe already and has picked up US distribution, so it may show up here again in the fall.

Comments

something I forgot to add at the end of the second paragraph

[alibi_shop]

Near the end, there's a gorgeous montage of close-ups of people she's watching at a swimming pool, of all body types; the luxury of diversity, and the texture of skin and limbs, fill the screen the way the mountains and fields did in the early village scenes. And it also becomes clear at that point why the village flashback scenes have continued, instead of stopping once the backstory was established, because those scenes lead up to a funeral where we slowly pan across the faces of the mourners, and we see memorable faces of different ages, shapes, and personalities, showing that the village was richly textured and beautiful in its own way... except that all of those faces are men, because that's who gets to do things and express themselves there.