Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Girl’ On Netflix, The Controversial Film About A Transgender Girl Wanting To Be A Top Ballet Dancer

Ever heard the phrase “You don’t know what you don’t know?” That’s the feeling many critics, as well the audience at Cannes, had when Girl debuted at the festival and got a standing ovation. To many, it looked like the most sophisticated portrait of a transgender teen they’d ever seen. But then the backlash from some members of the transgender community started, and they started making good points. Does the controversy take away from the movie’s quality?

GIRL: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Lara (Victor Polster) is a 15-year-old transgender girl who wants to be a classical ballet dancer. In the first scenes in the film, we see that, despite being a bit raw because she started training relatively late in life, she’s got enough talent to be accepted into one of Belgium’s top ballet schools. Her father Mathias (Arieh Worthalter) moves Lara and her little brother Milo (Oliver Bodart) into an apartment closer to the school.

Even though she’s on puberty blockers, Lara is eager for her 16th birthday to come so she can go on hormones, which will help her body develop into a more feminine form. Even though Lara’s father, doctor, and therapist all encourage her to live in the moment, and to not obsess over her body or the upcoming milestones, she does so anyway, especially when doing things like dancing on pointe — something only female ballet dancers are required to do — is painful, bloody and doesn’t come as naturally to her because of her body.

When she turns 16, she eagerly starts taking the hormones, but gets frustrated when she doesn’t start developing breasts right away. She also gets increasingly frustrated with having a penis, taping it down against the advice of both her father and doctor — she starts getting infections because of it. She also takes a larger hormone dose than her doctor recommends, and she stops eating, causing mood swings and, ironically, a decline in her ability to concentrate on her dance training.

Her frustration — including the girls in her dance class asking her to show her penis during a pool party — gets so overwhelming that Lara takes extreme measures to speed her full transition along (we’ll get to that scene in a moment).

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: I can’t think of any movie I’ve ever seen that’s like this. It’s especially frank about the body dysmorphia that can affect trans people, especially teens, as they go through their transitions.

Performance Worth Watching: Victor Polster as Lara. As a cisgender male, his casting as Lara has been met with a lot of controversy as yet another example of a trans role that should have gone to a trans actor. But, since this is based on the story of Nora Monsecour, a transgender ballet dancer and a friend of the director, Lukas Dhont, an actor had to be found that looked like Monsecour, could dance, and had the acting chops to pull off the complex emotions Lara was going through. Polster does a magnificent job with Lara, including her anger when her little brother calls her “Victor” in a spate of anger (a perhaps accidental slip by the kid, but making for a very powerful scene).

Memorable Dialogue: After a particularly frustrating make-out session with a neighbor, where Lara ends up giving him oral sex, she comes home and her father asks her for the umpteenth time how she’s doing. Lara rather snidely says, “Why do you always ask me that? Do you want me to ask you that all the time? Is everything all right? And how are things at work? And with Christine? Are you sure? You’re not too angry? Not too nice? Are you in a good mood? What did you have for breakfast? Annoying, isn’t it?” Either that’s the hormones talking or her dad has truly gotten under her skin.

Single Best Shot: To be honest, the single best shot is near the end, when Lara takes the extreme measures to speed along her transition, but that scene is too controversial and NSFW to make into a GIF. So we’ll take Lara’s attempts at blocking her neighbor’s roaming hands during their make-out session.

Sex and Skin: Another controversial part of the film: Polster was under 18 when he made the movie (he still is). Yet there are multiple scenes when Lara stares at her naked self in the mirror, including her penis.

Our Take: If I had reviewed Girl when it came out at the Cannes Film Festival, or when it got a Golden Globe nomination, I would have likely thought the movie was a triumph, with a nuanced view of the struggle a transgender teen goes through as they impatiently wait for their bodies to change.

But a scathing THR essay by critic Oliver Whitney, who is transgender, brought up some good points, especially about Lara’s self-mutilation scene at the end. That scene, even from the perspective of a cisgender person like myself, made me scratch my head, because Lara had been briefed on the nature of reassignment surgery, which she couldn’t have until she was 18. Even when I was watching the scene, I had the thought that Lara’s extreme action would actually hurt her when it comes time for that surgery to happen. So it took me out of the reality of that situation a bit.

Some of Whitney’s other points, like lingering scenes where Lara looks at her naked body, Lara’s emotional and physical decline as she wishes for her body to develop and long scenes where she slowly peels off the tape on her groin, are more a director’s choice than anything else. But the thought that, as a transgender girl, Lara would be so obsessed with her body seemed like a possibility. To Whitney, though, it was an extreme choice.

But when Monsecour wrote a response saying that Girl was more about her personal journey than a statement on the transgender experience, the movie’s context came into focus. This is the rare case when I did have to read some supporting information before I formulated my full review of a film. I knew the film was controversial, to the point where Netflix delayed the premiere by two months and set up a website to give people context and warnings about the subject matter (the website is also listed as soon as you press “Play”). So it was impossible to judge it just on the 105 minutes that played out on screen.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Monsecour’s context makes Dohnt’s direction, and Polster’s performance, all the more remarkable for its subtlety and compassion. Just be ready to sit through a few rough scenes.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company’s Co.Create and elsewhere.

Stream Girl on Netflix