Ozon is always open, gentle, and loyal to sex and gender, just like a lake on a spring night. For everyone in a gender crisis, his image itself is a kind of caress.
Gender is not only a part of subjectivity, but also innately desires the confirmation of others, thus preventing subjectivity and negating subjectivity.
For some people, it is a chain of raised volcanic islands on the cross-section of identity; for others, it is a sinking wet swamp. It always involuntarily endows the identity with dynamics, so it can inject an indescribable sense of tremor in the most ordinary life. This is why people are always aware of gender and try to dress up gender, but sometimes they have to channel gender like water control.
Does David want to be Virginia? We might as well ask, can David not become a Virginian? There was such a time in the film. He returned to work, visited a psychologist, and hired a nanny to take care of his daughter, thus achieving the usual life order. This shows that negative emotional suppression is entirely possible. Pay attention to the words of the psychiatrist: "Everyone has their own way of licking grief." Taking cross-dressing as an expedient and individualized "method of healing", once the pressure is released and the morbidity is relieved, it can be stopped at any time. This is like our habitual rhetoric of deceiving ourselves and knowing and acting from time to time. If you stop here, then the transvestite is no different from overeating, shopping spree, buying drunk and spreading all kinds of things. If you stop here, the political task of using images to rectify the transvestite's name can be considered to be completed properly. Cut off the details, and there will be another broad road leading to hypocrisy in the world.
If human emotions are only a temporary flood, we first deny emotions when we begin to govern.
If dressing up is nothing more than a thing outside of the body, we first deny the person being dressed up when we proceed to dress up.
Therefore, Ozon did not stop here, he continued to ask the "normal person" under the mask: If pretending to be another gender is just a way of healing, then where does the "injury" come from? Is it an encounter? Or is it an option? Or is it actually a re-emergence of subjectivity?
David told Claire that he was aware of the desire for women's clothing very early, and the two desires after Laura's death should be called "rekindling." He honestly described his first "reignition" when he put on a wedding dress for his dead wife:
"Later I thought of her smile when I first met, her excited eyes at the wedding, our wedding night... These memories gave me courage...
"I started from the bottom, putting on her wedding dress, sliding it gently over her thighs, then, putting on the top, buttoning the skirt, putting on the jewelry, putting on the shoes, I gently put the wreath on her golden hair superior…
"At that time, my desire to wear women's clothing rekindled, very clear..."
Ozon put this scene at the beginning of the film, with continuous close-ups: "Lipstick", "Eyelashes", "Blush", "Earrings", "Garters", "Rings", "Dresses", and "Corollas"...extremely subtle and extremely tender.
It turned out that those hands, the hands that pretended to be the deceased were not only her own, nor the unrelated funeral home staff, but her husband.
The person who loved her deeply caressed her by dressing up, and when she died, she also gave her a sense of touch with her physical existence as a memory, so she caressed her husband and aroused his clear desire and courage to face the desire. Here, the desire for forward and the longing for backward are isomorphic, intertwined to form a solid intertext, which is enough to support Virginal's awakening.
And his second "rekindle" was in response to Claire's longing and desires:
"But while playing tennis, when you told me that you miss Virginal, this awakened my desire. I also miss her...
"Claire, I can't'bypass' my life like this, it's in my body, and only you can help me accept all this...
(The translation of this subtitle group is incorrect, I have retranslated it against the original French)
"Don't deceive yourself, you and I have the same desires..."
In other words, Virginia is in David and will only be awakened when another subject desires her.
(And it seems that even some vulgar car accident awakening ends are just to find a physical appearance for "awakening", or use a contrasting method to prove that the awakening of the body is actually far less rich than the awakening of consciousness in the previous article. For miracles.)
Just as Socrates used "soul midwifery" to help Mannor's young slaves "recall" Pythagoras' theorem in "Mannor", the body of his wife Laura and the words of his lover Claire helped David "remember" A desire for life.
Desire is mathematics, which can be as clear, direct, and all-encompassing as mathematics.
If David's desire can be summarized by discriminatory terms or gimmicks like transvestite, then the film is more refined (worthy of five stars) in Claire's transformation.
Claire is a woman who self-identifies as a female, has female friends, fell in love with a male, and grew up as a female. It is a "normal person" who is so standard that it makes words lose their generality and explanatory power. However, the process of dressing up Virginia gradually aroused the more sensitive part of herself: she began to put on lipstick, put on skirts, and took the initiative in sex with her husband... She also began to dream of being caressed by her best friend Laura, fantasizing about her husband and her husband. David made out in the locker room...
She began to admit the pleasure of being stared at and stared at, and at the same time buried this pleasure with lies and indifferent hassle like every "normal person".
David has always been honest, as honest as a non-existent artistic figure, like a Pygmalion with a transvestite. And Claire is the incarnation of each of us, the incarnation of us who preached the story of Pygmalion and tried to steal a ray of light from him to illuminate the mediocrity and numbness.
At the end of the film, the hospital bed rises, Claire sits opposite the unconscious female Virginian, and the sculpture girl awakens her Pygmalion.
This chant in the final excerpt melts all hard hearts:
Je fréquentais alors des hommes un peu bizarres,
I often meet some strange men,
Aussi légers que la cendre de leurs cigares,
Frivolous like their cigar ashes,
Ils donnaient des soirées au château de Versailles,
Hold a party at the Palace of Versailles,
Ce n'étaient que des châteaux de paille,
Those palaces are like straws,
Et je perdais mon temps dans ce désert doré,
I wasted time in the golden desert,
J'étais seule quand je t'ai rencontré,
Until I met you alone,
Les autres s'enterraient, toi tu étais vivant,
They are all in the soil and you are full of life,
Tu chantais comme chante un enfant,
You sing like a child,
Tu étais gai comme un italien,
You are as happy as an Italian,
Quand il sait qu'il aura de l'amour et du vin,
When you know that there will be love and red wine,
Et enfin pour la première fois,
Finally for the first time in this life,
Je me suis enfin sentie:,
I feel that I am,
Femme, femme, une femme avec toi,
Woman woman with you woman.
View more about The New Girlfriend reviews
