This film is a genuinely moving story about courage, identity and inner freedom, centered on an intersex person trying to figure out who they really are. The fact that an actual intersex actor was cast in the lead role is genuinely worth applauding. It is apparently a remake of a classic film of same name that came out in 1972. Since I have not seen the film, I really have references to compare, which is good. Set in Spain, we meet Adela, a woman in her twenties and the only child of a conservative couple living in a small provincial town. Her days are mostly spent at the family antique shop, and her whole life has been shaped by her mother's overprotectiveness and total silence around her intersex condition, something she's faced real social discrimination for. Despite all the restrictions placed on her, she finds odd little pockets of normalcy in her life, and her closest connection is a gay priest, basically the only person she feels she can talk to freely. That quiet routi...
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A big chunk of the film is given over to four gay men who sit on stools, silhouetted in shadow to protect who they are, and talk about their feelings, their fears, the humiliations they've faced and what they hope for. There's also a lesbian and a bisexual man. A lot of the story actually gets told between the lines, in the way these people make excuses for how others treat them, in the way they explain themselves in terms that gay people in western countries would never even think to use, in the way some of them hide behind the label of bisexuality as a kind of smokescreen both for others and for themselves. Other voices come in too, social workers, religious figures. One lesbian who speaks really clearly and powerfully about her situation says, in direct contrast to what the religious spokesmen are saying, that heaven and hell exist right here on earth. And then there are these interviews with young straight men on the street who mock calls for gay rights with real cruelty, and those moments are a sharp, frightening reminder of just how much physical danger the people sitting in those shadows are actually in.
What stays with me is this idea of how wildly different things can be within the same continent. Kosovar gay people can literally look across towards western Europe and see what others have managed to build and fight for, and that must be equal parts comfort and torture. I actually visited Kosovo a while back and have genuinely warm memories of the place but I never even thought to look into whether there were any open bars or any kind of visible gay life there. I have a feeling homophobia is probably still pretty deeply rooted in that society even today. This is a brave and quietly powerful little film and it makes you hope that someone picks it back up and makes a follow up showing what, if anything, has shifted in the last 20 years. (5.5/10)
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