Film Movement
Alex (Inés Efron, foreground) in a scene from "XXY."
An intimate, atmospheric character study with a lingering erotic charge, Lucía Puenzo's "XXY" is one of the year's most impressive directing debuts. Maybe this film's international success has something to do with its sensational gender-theory subject matter -- the central character is an "intersex" teenager, not exactly a girl or a boy -- but on the other hand maybe not. (Puenzo won the Critic's Week Grand Prize at Cannes, and the film has played numerous other festivals.) Speaking personally, I was afraid that "XXY" might be one of those dogmatic, confrontational lecture-demonstrations in the mode of late-'80s "queer cinema." Instead, it's a nifty little Gothic fable of loneliness that would be plenty compelling even if young Alex (Inés Efron) knew what sex s/he was.
Alex is 15, and manifests as a girl. but as we gradually gather over the course of "XXY," that's the product of significant camouflage and medical effort. Puenzo expertly blends expository nuggets into her minimal narrative, but we don't need much. That's largely due to the extraordinary performance by Efron (an adult woman), who plays Alex as an awkward, oddly seductive blend of confidence and confusion. When she first meets Alvaro (Martín Piroyansky), a teenager who's come with his parents to visit Alex's family on the remote Uruguayan coast where they live, she says to him, "I've never fucked anybody. Do you want to?"