My fourth QFilm review in, I’ve found it is impossible not to notice a thin red thread running distinctly, yet subtly, through each of these works of art. Whether it’s a documentary about the NJ4 or a romantic dramady like Boy Meets Girl, the writer and/or director seems to try to convey one thing: that regardless of sexual orientation, gender or race, human is the term most deserved to describe any of the characters and actual people gracing us with their stories on screen.
Boy Meets Girl, written and directed by Eric Schaeffer, is a sex-positive exploration of what it means to be a man and what it means to be a woman and all the shades of gray outside and in between both gender labels. Ricky, played by Michelle Hendley, is a transgender woman (a biological man who identifies as a woman) who aspires to be a fashion designer.
Throughout the film, Ricky never wavers in her confidence as a woman, yet constantly has to deal with how she is perceived by others. Ricky is a catalyst for honesty, bringing out both the worst and best versions of her friends and loved ones. For those viewers that have a working knowledge of what it means to be transgender, Boy Meets Girl is simply a heartfelt romantic drama that will certainly cause a tear or two. For those who haven’t a clue about what it’s like to be transgender, Boy Meets Girl is as much educational as it is entertaining.
Francesca, played by Alexandra Turshen, discovers through her relationship with Ricky that love and admiration come in many forms, not all of which have to take any previous definitions of the self into consideration. Turshen’s character finds that living in the moment and sharing that with another person is what it means to live. In one of the more dramatically charged scenes of the film, Francesca laments that “it’s amazing… ’here’ is so electric. It’s a wonder more people don’t visit ‘here,’ but it hurts more too, ‘here’.”
If there’s one thing I have learned from watching each of these eye-opening films and one thing that their audiences cannot forget, it’s that there is no “they” or “it” or even “gay” or “bi-curious,” there is only happy or not happy, and the only consistent thing preventing happiness are the socially-prescribed judgments we place on the people we don’t understand. We sometimes fail to see people that are different from us as fellow humans, but instead choose to see them through a fearful lense as something we do not understand or are too arrogant or afraid to even try to understand.
Take a chance at the QFilm Fest 2014, to attend with an open mind and to try to leave with at least this seemingly simple, yet profound bit of knowledge. There is so much more to Boy Meets Girl than the sliver of my opinion I have placed here—you simply have to see it. It’s not that often that a “romantic dramady” can move one to produce such sappy emotional tears of satisfaction, like the ones that were (cough) running down my face.
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