The normality of being the other sex: Sébastien Lifshitz's "Little Girl" in Rendez-vous with French Cinema

“Little Girl,” the very interestingly made film that opens the Film at Lincoln Center’s annual Rendez-vous with French Cinema, the popular series which always has some revelations, offers what might be considered one unassuming counterargument to the much-advertised complaints of French President Emmanuel Macron and certain allied political elites that American-style multicultural identity politics is destroying France with its universalist republican traditions, as they appeal to the truer normality of Europe’s oldest nation-state with its more right and rigorous canons of reason and revolution. (Even if the usual object of trauma is not gender identity, that mainstay of English renaissance comedy, but France’s Muslims and the violent appeals of a noisy few of them to intolerance in the name of religion).

It’s hard not to be taken in by the eight-year old trans girl Sasha, who is so pretty and charming, and indeed very girlish. She seems remarkably untroubled, expressing only some sadness at the occasional lack of good will she encounters at school, never any real anger, while her mother, who admits she had wanted a girl, a fact for which the understanding lady doctor absolves her of guilt, takes such great pains. Indeed, the film is almost a paean to girlhood. The director makes a documentary in the form of a fiction film that is strongly narrated and tightly edited like one, as if thusly performing his own perfected dissembling. What better argument to make for the propriety and normality of this happy child’s devenir-femme.: It feels like fiction, but it’s a true story; no more avoiding the matter. With the very marked use of classical music, mostly that of French impressionism (Debussy and Ravel), which is also suited to Sasha’s artistic engagement in ballet at a conservatory, the film seems to make a strong case for a process of normalization, which thus in an almost uncanny way seems conservative malgré lui. Sasha (bearing the advantage at least of an ambiguously gendered prenom) collects Barbie dolls and her family, which near the end takes a normal French summer beach vacation, is so perfect, with the very concerned and nice mother, the very manly, stern and balding father who will with some pique go to bat for his daughter if he must, while her mother is a constantly doing. Most impressive is Sasha, who is one of the nicest, loveliest kids I have seen, with, to boot, one of the nicest, painstakingly solicitous moms I’ve seen on either side of a screen. The film's narrative form belies in a way the fact that most stories that engage us are actually far more troubled, since trauma and trouble are what generate most fictional narratives whether tragic or comic, and this film seems to almost argue for the contrary, making it in its quiet way that is so deliberately nice, a bit of a manifesto just for that. The director is able to do this with a set of people who are obviously a very well-chosen case for its demonstration, but of course they are all non-actors. It's the most feel-good film I have seen in a long time, and so, given the fetish that French films have for New York audiences, a great advertisement for the whole series. Perhaps even more than a middle-class heroine, une vraie petite fille is something to be.