Review: Beautiful Darling
What do you think I'd see
If I could walk away from me?
- "Candy Says", Velvet Underground
http://strangeflowers.wordpress.com/2010/02/13/review-beautiful-darling/ (http://strangeflowers.wordpress.com/2010/02/13/review-beautiful-darling/)
Is transphobia Hollywood's last acceptable prejudice?
Sympathetic depictions like Boys Don't Cry or Transamerica are far outnumbered by mainstream films in which a transgender character appears at best as a punchline, or as a prop to be rejected by the male protagonist, thus affirming his heterosexual virility. There are numerous examples but the vile How to Lose Friends & Alienate People sticks in the mind.
And we're only talking characters here; actual transgender performers are entirely absent from the multiplex. So it was particularly refreshing, and unexpectedly moving, to see Candy Darling's short life so sensitively handled in the documentary Beautiful Darling, which received its world premiere yesterday at the Berlinale.