THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – WHY NOT
For several years, many fictions and documentaries have been devoted to transidentity, obeying, at worst, a fad, at best, an imperative need to inform an audience often ignorant of trans reality. A Good Man seems to obey a desire to ” to raise awareness ” to the subject and, in passing, complicates the theme by dealing less with the choice of the transition than with the desire for a child which takes hold of a trans man.
In a relationship for six years, Benjamin (Noémie Merlant) decides to stop his hormonal treatment in order to be able to bear the child that his partner Aude (Soko) cannot have. The film travels between past and present, between the moment Benjamin, then a woman, begins his transition, and the moment he decides to interrupt it in order to find himself pregnant.
Obstacle course
Between medical appointments and incomprehension of relatives, the film sets a program run in advance: to narrate an obstacle course that we should only applaud. Any trace of doubt or incomprehension in the face of Benjamin’s choice is swept away, referred to reactive behavior.
By heroizing more than reason the couple, A Good Man deprives it of ambiguities and gray areas. Benjamin and Aude are doomed to blandness, buried under a lifeless naturalism, which gives the film the air of a prevention spot against transphobia. Inspired by the documentary Coby (2017), by Christian Sonderegger, who dealt with the same subject, fiction adds nothing to its model, except to bring the theme of transidentity into a completed academicism.
French film by Marie-Castille Mention-Schaar. With Noémie Merlant, Soko, Vincent Dedienne (1 h 48).