How must the world appear to someone who has been treated as an exotic clinical specimen from birth? The moody, surreal XXY explores the world of Alex (Ines Efron), an intersex teenager — born with both male and female sex organs — navigating the treacherous emotional and hormonal rapids of uncertain gender.
The movie, directed by the Argentine filmmaker Lucia Puenzo and based on Sergio Bizzio’s short story Cinismo, is not a clinical case study, though months of research went into its creation. It is a somber, brooding study of Alex and her parents as they face the painful crossroads when adulthood looms. To help their child feel as normal as possible, Alex’s parents have fled Argentina to a remote seaside enclave in Uruguay, where her protective father, Kraken (Ricardo Darin), works as a marine biologist.
But even here, curious teenagers from the fishing village recognize that Alex is different and react with predictable cruelty. There is a near-rape scene in which several boys drag her into the dunes and pull off her pants to inspect her anatomy.
PHOTO COURTESY OF BEST
This overly schematic movie pointedly compares Alex to the marine life under Kraken’s scrutiny: sea turtles, a giant squid and especially clown fish, which exhibit behavior known as sequential hermaphroditism, when the male changes sex and becomes female.
Alex, with the aid of hormonal therapy, has been living as a girl. But with the onset of adolescence, her sexuality has begun to bloom, and for reasons she never explains and perhaps couldn’t put into words, she has recently stopped taking the drugs. Her deepest impulse is to be simply who s/he is.
Although she has developed breasts and has a girl’s voice, we eventually discover that she has a penis (unseen in the movie). Her masculinization may not yet be visible in facial hair and other signs, but her male aggression has already landed her in trouble. As the story begins, she has overreacted to the curiosity of a close male friend about her sexuality and has broken his nose.
Under increasing pressure from her parents to make a final decision about whether to live as a boy or a girl, she is furiously reluctant to choose. And Efron’s thrashing performance conveys Alex’s complicated mixture of ambivalence and defiance.
Visiting from Buenos Aires are a plastic surgeon, Ramiro (German Palacios); his wife, Erika (Carolina Peleritti); and their skinny, buck-toothed 16-year-old son, Alvaro (Martin Piroyansky). The rapidly intensifying relationship between Alex and Alvaro, who is sexually curious but not fully aware of his own gay tendencies, is the movie’s dramatic crux. Will they make love? If so, how? How will they feel afterward?
Their nervous flirtation culminates in a remarkable sex scene that is as confusing to the audience as it is to the characters, who enjoy it despite their anxiety afterward. That scene, and everything leading up to it, evoke a hyperaware sexual limbo in which you scrutinize the masculine and feminine components in the movie’s other characters and recognize the degree to which everyone has both.
If XXY is imagistically too programmatic (a scene of carrots being sliced is typical of its Freudian heavy-handedness) and devoid of humor, it never seems pruriently exploitative. It sustains an unsettling mood of ambiguity that lingers long after the final credits.
That US assistance was a model for Taiwan’s spectacular development success was early recognized by policymakers and analysts. In a report to the US Congress for the fiscal year 1962, former President John F. Kennedy noted Taiwan’s “rapid economic growth,” was “producing a substantial net gain in living.” Kennedy had a stake in Taiwan’s achievements and the US’ official development assistance (ODA) in general: In September 1961, his entreaty to make the 1960s a “decade of development,” and an accompanying proposal for dedicated legislation to this end, had been formalized by congressional passage of the Foreign Assistance Act. Two
Despite the intense sunshine, we were hardly breaking a sweat as we cruised along the flat, dedicated bike lane, well protected from the heat by a canopy of trees. The electric assist on the bikes likely made a difference, too. Far removed from the bustle and noise of the Taichung traffic, we admired the serene rural scenery, making our way over rivers, alongside rice paddies and through pear orchards. Our route for the day covered two bike paths that connect in Fengyuan District (豐原) and are best done together. The Hou-Feng Bike Path (后豐鐵馬道) runs southward from Houli District (后里) while the
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March 31 to April 6 On May 13, 1950, National Taiwan University Hospital otolaryngologist Su You-peng (蘇友鵬) was summoned to the director’s office. He thought someone had complained about him practicing the violin at night, but when he entered the room, he knew something was terribly wrong. He saw several burly men who appeared to be government secret agents, and three other resident doctors: internist Hsu Chiang (許強), dermatologist Hu Pao-chen (胡寶珍) and ophthalmologist Hu Hsin-lin (胡鑫麟). They were handcuffed, herded onto two jeeps and taken to the Secrecy Bureau (保密局) for questioning. Su was still in his doctor’s robes at
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