An interview with Lucia Puenzo, director of XXY,
by Bijan Tehrani of Cinema Without Borders
XXY is about Alex, a 15-year-old teenager with a secret.
Soon after her birth her parents decide to leave Buenos Aires to
make a home out of an isolated wooden cabin tucked away in the
dunes of the Uruguayan shoreline.
XXY begins with Alex's parents receiving a couple of friends
and their 16-year-old son Álvaro from Buenos Aires. Álvaro's
father is a plastic surgeon who accepted the invitation because
of his medical concern for their friend's daughter. The
inevitable attraction between both teenagers forces them all to
face their worst fears . . . Rumours are spreading around town.
Alex gets stared at as if she were a freak. People's fascination
with her can become dangerous.
Lucia Puenzo was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1976.
She published the novels El Niño Pez (Beatriz Viterbo, Tusquets,
2004), 9 minutos (Beatriz Viterbo, Tusquets, 2005) and La
Maldición de Jacinta Pichimahuida (Interzona, 2007). XXY, her
first feature length film, received the support of the
Cinéfondation, Fond Sud, INCAA and ICAA. She has also directed
short films, documentaries and the telefilm Los Invisibles.
Cinema Without Borders: XXY is a daring and unusual film, what
inspired you to make this film?
Lucia Puenzo: XXY is based on a short story called "Cinismo",
from the Argentine writer Sergio Bizzio. From the moment I read
that story -- the sexual awakening of a young girl who has what
doctors call genital ambiguity -- I couldn't take it out of my
head. I began to write with that image in my head: the body of a
young person with both sexes in the same body. I was especially
interested in the dilemma of inevitable choice: not only having
to choose between being a man or a woman, but also having to
choose between a binary decision and intersex as an identity and
not as a place of mere passage.
CWB: How much research was done on the subject before writing the
script?
LP: Months of research... I worked with doctors, geneticists,
teachers, parents of children who were born with different
diagnoses of intersexuality, and young adults who had or had not
been operated when they were born. The time I lived in Paris, in
the Cinéfondation, I contacted Alex Jurgen, a German intersex
person who made a documentary of her life (Octopusalarm) in
which, after of years of operations and taking hormones to become
a man, Alex realizes he will never be merely a man or a woman.
CWB: How did you choose the actors for the film? Are they all
professional actors?
LP: Yes, they are actors. I worked in a different way with the 4
adults than with the 2 young ones. With the adults we didn't
rehearse much, we had very long talks and detailed readings of
every scene, by the time we started shooting we knew each other,
and the characters and the tone we were looking for. With Inés
and Martín, we also talked and read. Inés came with me to many
interviews with doctors and parents, then we began to rehearse,
improvise, play, search for the bodies of the characters (because
Inés is feminine and fragile and Martín has nothing of the
clumsiness of Alvaro), and the way they spoke. When the shooting
began I tried to have as much time as possible to work with the
actors in the scene, with only the DP and cameraman looking, to
give the actors as much freedom as possible, not to have them
move inside the shot I imagined but to create the shot after
seeing them move in the scene.
CWB: Ines Efron has great and convincing performance as Alex, did
you work with her before you started shooting?
LP: With Inés something that was fundamental was finding a way
for her to seduce and provoke from a masculine way, because at
first everything she did was extremely feminine. So that was
something I was especially focused on. Also, their youth, they
are 24 years old, they had to appear to be almost 10 years
younger, that youth was something to be very careful with. Their
voice, we had to work with Inés' voice everyday, with every line.
CWB: And with Ricardo Darin?
LP: He's a friend. I didn't know him when I sent him the script.
He called me some days later, we met to have a conversation,
after which he said he would be Kraken. From that day all he has
done is support the project in every way he could. Clearly the 4
adult and the 2 young ones are from different worlds. But that
was good for the film, because Alex and Alvaro have to be in
another world. Their romance is told in a different tone than
the dilemma that the parents are trapped in. Ricardo used to say
working with Inés and Martín was exciting because he could never
tell where their heads were, nor anticipate their reactions,
quite a compliment for the kids. We all felt that the different
backgrounds of the actors were good for everyone.
CWB: What was the most challenging aspect of making XXY?
LP: Everything was a risk: being a writer who is directing a
first film, the mix of very well known actors with young kids who
were doing their first roles, the subject, having a main actress
six months pregnant (with a pregnancy that had to be disguised)
. . . As for the subject, knowing intersex should be discussed as
a cultural phenomenon, and should not be reduced to the body of a
few individuals and the experience that they might have. While I
was certain of these things, I wanted to find a way to show them
in a small love story between two very young persons who, while
they were falling in love, would be discovering their identity.
CWB: What has been the audience's reaction to XXY inside and
outside Argentina?
LP: In Argentina and Italy, and other countries where the film
has already been released, it created a debate on what seems
almost impossible in our societies: an intersex body that has not
been mutilated, and not only survives but demands the opportunity
to be desired. Who decides, after all, that there are only two
ways to be human? Many intersex friends have told me they liked
the film not because of they idea of freedom of choice that many
people saw in it, but because of the place the film gives to
desire. And I agree: it's not enough to say we should respect
any body and any sexual identity and give every individual the
right to do as he or she pleases with their identity. The film
includes to this the possibility that anybody (a virgin like
Alvaro in this case) could fall in love and be aroused by a body
like Alex's. Perlongher, one of my favourite poets, used to say:
"We do not want respect, we want to be desired." The search of
an identity (not only sexual) is vital in the life of everybody.
CWB: Have you ever had the experience of sharing XXY with a
person with XXY condition?
LP: Yes, with many. An intersex activist and friend of mine
(Mauro Cabral) says: "The inter contained in the word intersex
seems to suggest that we are between men and women, creating all
type of analogies with transexuality, homosexuality,
heterosexuality, bisexuality, etc. . . . As if they were all a
family of words and different ways to have sex with somebody."
Some think intersex means not having a clear sexual orientation,
and that the only discussion around this issue is to avoid the
mutilation of their body.
The movie also brings to light the ostracism that people with a
difference are suffering from. From all the experiences that
define this complex theme that we call intersexuality in
Argentina, one is especially painful: it's not the corporal
differences nor the well-intentioned brutality with which
medicine and law have treated children born with genital
ambiguity in the last years, and the irreversible consequences
these surgeries have on their bodies and their lives. When I
began to write XXY, I was surprised to see that there are almost
no stories on this subject, there's a strange cultural silence
over it. If the subject is explored it's in the language of
testimony, of medical diagnosis, but with almost no fictions, as
if the subject would be a taboo for any kind of poetic and
fiction around it, as it was in ancient times.
CWB: How did you decide on visual style of the film?
LP: I've always liked literature and cinema that works with
characters and relationships more than with plots, such as the
cinema of Haneke, Bruno Dumont, Cassavetes. Literature of
Cheever, Nabokov, and the Argentines Aira and Puig. My interest
when I wrote this film was, above all, the relationship between
Alex and Alvaro. I didn't want my film to become a medical case,
a clinical case, almost a documentary. Even if the script had
been supervised by doctors and geneticists, it was important to
make them understand that I was not looking for any medical
realism. I even worked with more than one diagnosis in Alex's
body.
I've always enjoyed literature and cinema that raises questions
more than that which gives answers. Finishing a book or going
out of the cinema with the head full of questions is good enough
for me. If I have to give an answer I would say XXY speaks about
freedom of choice, identity and desire.
CWB: Please tell us about your future projects.
LP: I have just finished the adaptation of my first novel, The
Fish Child, a love story between 2 young girls, and I'm writing a
new novel and 2 short stories for 2 anthologies.
posted Wed, 20 Feb 2008 08:38:00
http://www.cinemawithoutborders.com/news/127/ARTICLE/1477/2008-02-20.html
Screengrab Q&A: Lucia Puenzo,
by Alexandra Godfrey
I was probably about six years old when my mother told me
about the baby boy she almost had. The baby that would have been
born with an extra chromosome; an XXY. The doctors advised she
terminate the pregnancy or risk having a very sick child. This
was the 1970s, and little research had been done on chromosomal
abnormalities. Today's evidence shows that if my mother had not
been pressured to abort that baby boy, he very well may have
grown up healthy and strong, with minimal behavioral issues.
Nothing like the terrors the doctors had warned her about.
As a sophomore in college, I began feverishly studying the
topic of intersexuality. I pored over Foucault's The History of
Sexuality and obsessed about Anne Fausto-Sterling's theory of a
five-sex gender model. Perhaps, I thought, it was part of my
life's purpose to educate people about intersexuality, in homage
to the baby who died so that I could exist.
Imagine my intrigue when I discovered the award-winning film
XXY. Directed by Lucia Puenzo, this edgy, enthralling film
explores the dramatic soul-searching of one intersex fifteen
year-old, painfully straddling two worlds. It's a passionate
depiction of the tumultuous road from desire to discovery.
Puenzo called to discuss the film from her home in Argentina.
Alexandra Godfrey: What inspired you to make this film?
Lucia Puenzo: It was a writer who's right here with me -- my
husband, who wrote a short story about an intersex named Alex,
and as soon as I read that short story I knew I wanted to do that
film.
AG: Did you have any personal connection to the story?
LP: Actually, not at the moment when I read the short story. Of
course I knew quite a lot about it because it was always for me
an interesting subject, and I had read the few books -- like
Middlesex. It was curious for me how few artistic expressions of
intersex I could find in modern times, because in ancient times
there were so many, it was incredible.
AG: They had a lot of very beautiful artwork depicting people
with ambiguous genitalia and it was really more of an open thing.
LP: Exactly, and they were always very powerful people, very
respected. And something happened, after centuries and coming
into modern times, where they began to be seen as people who had
some kind of illness that had to be normalized. So that for me
was a bit of a question mark, you know, why had that happened?
AG: It's surprising that it's a taboo topic in today's
progressive society. Was part of your reason for making this
film to show people who might still be ignorant what it means to
have a chromosomal abnormality?
LP: Well, to be honest, at first, it was more of a selfish
reason; I write literature, and I make cinema for me. If I
cannot take it out of my head. Because you spend so much time
with that material, that if it's only for altruistic reasons, to
do something for others to see, I think you cannot -- that desire
is very difficult to work with for such a long time. So from the
moment I read the story, I was so captivated by the love
relationship of these two, of Alvaro and Alex, that I just knew I
had to make something with it. Then, yes, when I began to do
some research I realized I not only had something that I really
loved as a subject but that the moment in the world was special.
AG: As time has gone on I'm sure you've reached a lot of people
who were ignorant about the subject.
LP: Absolutely, many. I had never imagined that for how many
people the subject was almost a mythology. Many people they
thought that it couldn't be possible. That was a big surprise
for me. You can see also how a country or a specific city is
like that. In a very conservative city in Spain, everybody in
the audience thought it was completely fiction. They couldn't
imagine that it was possible. And in places like Thailand or
Germany and the States, there was so much more knowledge that
this was not fiction and that it really happens.
AG: Were you able to share the movie with people who are intersex
in some way?
LP: Yes. The film was supported so much by so many of these
people. I think that the film actually did well in many
countries because many intersex people went out to defend and
speak about the film. I really didn't look in the film for
medical realism, in the sense that even though I researched for
many months and the script was supervised by geneticists and by
psychologists and many doctors, it was important for me that this
was a fiction. Alex is not purely XXY; I used more than one
diagnosis, not because I didn't know what I was doing but because
of this idea that intersexuality can be poetic. And people
absolutely understood and defended that. In Italy and Argentina
some doctors explained why I was using one diagnosis in the title
when the diagnosis in the film was different, and I think they
supported the film because they understood that intersexuality
can be a place of permanence and not a place of passage.
AG: In your own words, what does XXY mean?
LP: XXY clinically is a syndrome of young boys who start to
feminize; it's actually the opposite of Alex. At the same time
for me, XXY, outside the medical world, is this idea of the XX or
XY together in one same body. It was also this idea of the three
letters in the graphics for the film -- it's almost like three Xs
and the third one has one leg cut off. It was the idea that in a
world where so many people look the same, some people have been
normalized. Also, for me it was very important to me to find a
title that was universal. Everywhere, even in Japan, the film
was called XXY.
AG: There's a lot of symbolism like that in the film. Alex's
father, a marine biologist, is named Kraken.
LP: Yes, I really liked this idea of this biologist who had
studied the sexuality of other species in the world, who always
saw Alex as the perfect creature. He never understood why Alex
should be operated on or normalized. I thought it was important
to have the other worlds where hermaphrodite organisms exist,
like the animal world, present in some point. Sea turtles, from
the outside, you cannot see if they are female or male. You have
to open them.
AG: Despite being very feminine looking, Ines Efron does a
fabulous job of playing the ambiguous role and convincing the
viewer of her dual existence. What kind of training did she go
through?
LP: She worked very hard. She went with me to many interviews
with doctors and geneticists and she became a patient to one of
them to understand exactly what was going on with her body. Then
we spent many weeks with her and Alvaro going out to the street
and looking for people whom we thought would move like Alex would
move, and it was very hard for her not to look at men like she
was a woman. She is so feminine and so fragile, she had to be
very careful to go forth from a more androgynous place.
AG: The sex scene between Alex and Alvaro is obviously quite a
pivotal point in the film. It manages to be tender, awkward and
at the same time almost animalistic.
LP: That was actually the last day of the shooting. By that time
we were very close, all of us. We had never rehearsed the scene
because that was actually something that I never wanted to do; I
wanted to reach that point and to find that scene for the first
time. The only thing I asked for was to have a lot of time. We
took the whole day and we had a lot of fun actually. The whole
team could hear us laughing from the outside. It came out from
games and playing. And Alex and Alvaro are very close friends,
so that was very good.
AG: Alex's animalistic qualities at this point suggest that
sexuality is a human's most innate, primal characteristic.
LP: Many people suggest the film is about freedom of choice and
more rational things; I think it is a film basically about
desire, no? The sexuality in the film is the most important, and
that's what we worked on very much -- and I thought that that was
actually the only thing that moved the film all the time. I
think that when people connect with their sexuality and what
makes them feel desire, they are saved.
posted by Peter Smith, May 02 2008, 06:15 PM
http://www.nerve.com/CS/blogs/screengrab/archive/2008/05/02/screengrab-q-amp-a-lucia-puenzo.aspx
