DIFFERENT FOR GIRLS
A film review by David N. Butterworth
Copyright 1997 David N. Butterworth
Rating: **1/2 (Maltin scale)
Finding love in today's day and age is difficult enough, but when the girl you fancy used to be a boy, it makes for some added complications.
The relationship between a straight guy and a transsexual (who also happens to be straight) forms the root of "Different for Girls," a transmuted romantic comedy that is only partially successful. Tony Marchant's script works best when it deals directly with the relationship between Prentice (Rupert Graves), a free-wheeling, arresting young man, and Kim (Steven Mackintosh), a repressed transsexual trying to come to terms with her sexual identity.
The two were schoolboy friends back when Kim was Karl.
Twenty years later Prentice is working as a courier for a London dispatch service and "hasn't really come through puberty." At 34 he's still listening to punk 45s from the late seventies--Stiff Little Fingers, Wreckless Eric, the Buzzcocks, etc.--and has a volatile personality to match. Kim, "three years pre-op and one year post," writes creative verse for a greeting card company, and the two run into one another on the city streets, rekindling lost interests and emotions.
What's refreshing about their relationship is that Prentice, for all his rudeness and crudeness, is so accepting of Kim. His attraction to her is unexamined and non-judgmental. Kim refers to Prentice as an "odd sock"; like those you lose in the wash, they invariably come back together. The implication, of course, is that she's his match.
Unfortunately, the events surrounding their social intercourse is the stuff of pure soap opera, which wind up bogging the film down, such as when Prentice is arrested for some indecent highjinks after a rant. In addition, there's a distracting and way too obvious subplot concerning Kim's brother-in-law, whose infertility brings into question his definition of manliness.
Writer Marchant's brushstrokes are far too broad: Prentice is rough-edged, Kim is refined and softly-spoken (although in most scenes her masculinity is as obvious as a five o'clock shadow). When they groove to the sounds of "The Only Ones" in Prentice's hovel of an apartment, it's oddly moving, their contrasting dance styles distinguishing the roles they have chosen in life. But it's one of the few sequences that really work in the picture. A voyeuristically uncomfortable scene, in which Prentice asks to see Kim's surgically-altered body for himself, comes across as gratuitous rather than pivotal, as if seeing a naked transsexual formed the initial conceit behind this film.
At times director Richard Spence seems more concerned with the industrialized landscape of the London Docklands than he does the interaction between Prentice and Kim, utilizing unnecessarily dramatic crane shots and thunderous rock music to contrast the unfolding human drama.
Graves and Mackintosh give a good account of themselves but "Different for Girls" simply doesn't have the courage to examine forcefully the issues at its center. In fact, for a film that claims to be different, it's remarkably--and disappointingly--mainstream.
-- David N. Butterworth dnb@mail.med.upenn.edu
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