“You’re doing a lot of hearing and understanding, but I just don’t know if you do,” an embittered helpline caller complains of the staid young adviser at the end of the phone. The understanding ear, Izzy (Avalon Fast), lacks the experiences that led the speaker to dial. She simply says the words she thinks the other woman wants to hear. When a sudden revelation prompts similar pleas in Izzy’s personal life, cracks begin to show. Castration Movie is a sprawling anthology project from Canadian underground filmmaker Louise Weard. Its first two instalments garnered word-of-mouth attention and acclaim for their uncompromising depictions of transgender lives and the culture that sees, counters and corrodes them – lo-fi camerawork, a who’s who of queer actors, and ambitious scope. Originally intended as the first half of the anthology’s third instalment, Chapter iii.ii is presented as a standalone, two-hour theatrical film. It’s the perfect segment of Weard’s project to reach a broader audience, as it aims to be accessible – a fascinating Rorschach test that can be read cleanly and agreeably by both transgender and transphobic spectators.
Trent (Henri Gillespi) is Izzy’s unemployed, live-in boyfriend of nine years. One evening, after an introspective afternoon at the skate park, Trent announces that she is a transgender woman named Tiffany. What follows is a painfully acute and impressively kaleidoscopic anthropology of our present trans moment. Fast is unflinchingly believable as Tiffany’s blindsided, increasingly resentful partner. In a matryoshka-of-a-performance, they allow themselves to be swallowed by their character (opposite to their real selves) – convincingly consumed by disbelief and denial.
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Gillespi appears effortlessly natural as a trans woman possessed, equal parts foil and catalyst for sympathy with Izzy’s unease. The camera holds on their faces as their understanding fractures. Confiding in a friend, Izzy tiptoes around saying the quiet part out loud, yet misgenders Tiffany at every turn. Where a neater, more responsible film might explicitly disavow perspectives that invalidate or question the sincerity of trans identity, Weard takes the “by trans folks for trans folks” foundation of the project as carte blanche for charting the ripostes and nuances of outside opinion, satirising yet humanising transphobia to discomforting effect. “We’re here to make trans women feel better, not worse,” argues one trans character (Jane Schoenbrun, wearing a shit-eating grin in a delightful cameo), as they (metatextually) admonish Weard, here an honest-to-a-fault leader of a support group for trans women and their partners.
The subjective truth of the film, however, can be located in its handheld camerawork – self-conscious and intentional against the naturalistic performances. Weard’s film operates with the same dynamics as many people experience the trans-presenting gender of others. Something in that image jars with their understanding of “reality” and pulls them back from accepting it as truth. We can either reject what we see as being construction, artifice, performance, or we can lean in and head deeper into the rabbit hole.