Tomboy

Two feature films into her career, writer-director Céline Sciamma has proven unusually skilled at making short, plot-light movies about budding adolescents discovering themselves. Sciamma’s 2007 film Water Lilies is a lovely, delicate little story about teenage girls exploring their blossoming sexuality, and now Tomboy follows a 10-year-old girl who moves to a new town and is delighted to realize that she can pass as a boy among her new circle of friends. Zoé Héran plays the girl, who impulsively introduces herself as “Mikael” to her pretty new neighbor, Jeanne Disson. Héran and her peers are at an age where they’re starting to designate certain people as “popular,” and starting to preen in front of the opposite sex. The short-haired, sharp-featured Héran makes such a handsome boy that males and females alike are immediately drawn to her. Sure, she has to sneak off into the woods alone when all the guys on her soccer team go pee on the sidelines, but she’s a good goal-scorer, she knows how to spit, and she looks lean, fit, and flat with her shirt off.