Film: Girls who do boys, who do girls First Edition

• Published in: The Independent on Sunday
• Main Author: Romney, Jonathan
• Format: Newspaper Article
• Language: English
• Published: London (UK) Independent Digital News & Media 26.03.2006

Staggering along the road in a high-collared pink frock, holding on to her hat for dear life, Bree (Felicity Huffman, Lynette from Desperate Housewives) looks for all the world like a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown- or like an under-confident drag act. The reality is more complicated. Pedro Almodvar's 1987 film The Law of Desire played a dizzying game with sexual ambivalence, casting a woman (Carmen Maura) as the hero's transsexual former brother. Duncan Tucker's comedy Transamerica adds a further twist, casting Huffman as a pre-op transsexual: Bree, ne Stanley, is taking hormone medication and training himself to "pass" as a woman, but hasn't yet had the operation that will make him - to use a favourite Almodvar word - "authentic". Crammed with acidic one-liners, Tucker's witty script makes remarkably sustained play on the unresolved question of Bree's/ Stanley's gender: mistaking Toby for Bree's toy boy, her sister marvels, "You lucky son of a... I mean, you lucky bitch." Transamerica is very much a linguistic comedy. Bree handles words as if with tweezers, talking a stilted, absurdly lady-like salon- speak: "How much do you make per... assignation?" she asks Toby about his hustling. But words are just part of the overall language that Bree struggles to adopt. She describes her body as a "work in progress", but it's hard to shake off the body language of a lifetime. Maleness re-emerges inmoments of crisis, as in afumbled attempt to piss on a highway: in what must be counted the film's farcical money shot, we get a brief jaw-dropping flash of Huffman with a prosthetic penis. Gradually, though, Bree's theatrical gestures evolve into something like a second-nature grace: when Calvin serenades her with "Beautiful Dreamer", this potentially mawkish moment is saved by Huffman's eloquently bashful flutters of head and hand.