There’s a moment in the new French movie Tomboy, when our “hero” triumphantly rips off her soccer shirt, that gave me both a rush of joy and a lump in my throat. This is 10-year-old Laure, who’s passing herself off to her new friends as a boy called Michael in Celine Sciamma’s superb new drama about a girl who’s definitely not into pink. When Michael pulls the shirt off to reveal a naked, flat-chested torso, it pulled me right back into my own tomboy childhood — that bliss you feel when nobody knows you’re really a girl, that fantastic lightness of being you experience when you are managing to be utterly and euphorically yourself.
Zoe Heran is mesmerizing as the shyly swaggering Laure/Michael. She is a much cooler tomboy than I ever was back in the 1970s. I occasionally “passed” as a boy when my mother let me have really short hair, but willowy Michael passes all the time. Her mother doesn’t let her wear swimming trunks to the pool (mine did), but she does not have the budding breast problem I suffered at her age. I would walk round the swimming pool with my arms extended ludicrously into the air pretending to casually stretch and yawn, because that made the irritating buds disappear.
Yet how successful you are as a tomboy also depends on how your mum deals with it all. Sciamma’s movie, a surprise box office hit in France and already garlanded with prizes in Berlin, San Francisco and Odessa, takes us through all the potential mother/tomboy daughter battlefields. Will she let you wear trunks to the pool? How short will she let you have your hair? Will she let you wear boys’ pants?
I still remember the look on my mother’s face in Marks & Spencer, when I innocently asked, aged nine, if I could have a pair of Y-fronts. The look of dismay made me realize, for the first time, that there might be something slightly wrong with me.
I had already experienced the trauma of having my long curly hair cut off at the age of six. My mother’s trauma, not mine. I was ecstatic when the man in the greengrocer’s started calling me “sonny,” but when it was time for another haircut, I had to have a puff ball that felt painful to sport.
Luckily, it was quite late in the day that I realized what an uphill struggle being a woman was going to be. Being a tomboy now strikes me as a master class in the future horrors and hypocrisies of womanhood and the scales finally fell away when I was 10. I had beaten up two boys who had been picking on my twin brother and they went wailing back to their mum and dad, only to return half an hour later saying their parents wanted to see me. I trudged off to my punishment as if it was a medal.
Yet when the dad opened the door, there was a flash of fury on his face followed by a shout of, “It’s a bloody girl!” He grabbed his puzzled sons by the scruff of the neck and slammed the door in my face.
I stood on the doorstep with an uneasy sense of things to come, trying to pin down why there would have been hell to pay if I had been a boy, but not if I was a girl.
Michael’s tomboy life is a bit more anguished than mine was. She has the added complication of being the object of desire of one of the girls in her new gang. Tension builds as the idyllic summer moves towards autumn and you suspect that tragedy awaits.
Sciamma, whose first film, Water Lilies, was about burgeoning female sexuality, says she was not a tomboy as a child in the 1980s, but that she often got mistaken for a boy.
“Lots of girls had short hair in those days, so the frontiers were more blurry,” she says. “It’s harder to be a tomboy now because you have to be a girl sooner.”
The other reason it is harder to be a tomboy today is that the mainstream is much more sophisticated about gender than it was and tomboys can seem dangerous to some. Even middle England is now familiar with the term “transitioning” in relation, perhaps, to Cher’s daughter, Chastity, who is now a son called Chaz. Warren Beatty and Annette Benning’s daughter, Kathlyn, also a big tomboy in her teens, is now an adult calling herself Stephen and apparently preparing for surgery.
It is heartening that Hollywood kids are putting a spanner in the gender works — even the ones not aware that they are doing it. Take Shiloh Jolie-Pitt, whose first two years were dogged by headlines about how she was the world’s most beautiful celebrity baby. Now five, she asks to be called John and wears the kind of clothes that demonstrate she has no interest in playing the princess game (unlike her bizarre mini-drag queen contemporary Suri Cruise). Gossip magazines such as US Weekly, which did a recent number on her “Princess Charming” haircut, are clearly not happy with the direction Shiloh is taking and insist on trying to shoehorn her into a glass slipper she obviously doesn’t want to wear.
However, Tomboy is not just about tomboys. It is about what Sciamma calls, in her French way, “the sensuality of childhood.” That absolute freedom you feel as a child that you will never feel again. You get that intoxicating sense of endless horizons as you watch the film’s rough, tough, cream-puff estate kids daring each other to put chewing gum into each other’s mouths and giggling about what pee tastes like.
Sciamma says she wanted “to leave the movie open to all hypotheses,” meaning that just because you want to wear swimming trunks, it doesn’t mean you really want to be a boy. And just because you’re a tomboy, it doesn’t mean you will grow up to be a lesbian or a trans man. Then again, maybe it does.
“Is this the beginning of a radical journey in Laure’s change of identity?” Sciamma asks. “Or is it just a game? Kids like to pretend to be a pirate and some pretend to be a boy.”
I played the tomboy role until the age of 12, when suddenly I decided I needed flowery Laura Ashley skirts and mules with 10cm heels (my poor mother must have thought her boat had come in). Later, I did a little unimpressed dabbling with men, then became much more enthused by lesbianism and now I’m going out with a gay man, so who knows what it all means?
Certainly, the idea of disguise, implicit in the double life of the tomboy, has helped me later in life. I have learned that dragging up in heels and a pencil skirt (I still have issues with dresses) can be as great a sartorial masquerade as trunks and boy shorts.
However, I am still not sure where the pink roses fit in. I recalled with shock the other day that on my birthday, I always insisted on pink sugar roses on my cake while my twin brother (who was a sissy boy, later to become a gay man) wanted blue roses on his. Pink did not have such grim Barbie connotations back then and I think it simply seemed a more exciting color — suggestive of flesh and life.
So there you go. Maybe you cannot put all tomboys in the same mould either. “Tu n’est pas comme les autres,” says Michael’s gauche and intrigued girlfriend at one point. And thank goodness for that.
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