October 8th, 1997 to October 14th, 1997

Remade for Each Other:

Different for Girls opens at Music Box Oct. 10

by Steve Warren
Most men, straight or gay, wince at the thought of gender reassignment surgery, even if we're in touch with our feminine sides and some of our best friends are transsexuals.

Different for Girls may stand for some time as the best screen love story involving a male-to-female transsexual. Not that there's much competition, unless you count the subplot in The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. Steven Mackintosh's performance as the tranny here is no match for Terence Stamp's in that film, but it's no minor achievement. This isn't Tootsie or Mrs. Doubtfire, about a guy putting on a dress.

We meet Karl as the school queer, being tormented by the other boys in the shower until he's rescued by his best friend and protector, Paul Prentice. Twenty years later they meet again, but Karl is now Kim (Mackintosh) and Prentice (Rupert Graves) almost doesn't recognize her. Once he finds out the truth ("Are you like this all the time?" he asks awkwardly. "Well, I'm not a fucking drag queen!" Kim responds), Prentice has some reluctance about renewing their acquaintance, but both curiosity and attraction compel him to make a date for coffee.

Kim, who only completed surgery a year ago after three years' counseling and preparation, works under Miriam Margolyes at a greeting card firm, writing sappy poetry, and leads a quiet life, trying not to attract attention. Prentice, on the other hand, is a bike messenger, rowdy and volatile, who can turn the slightest disagreement into a major brawl. He's always broke and always on the verge of "getting things sorted out" in his life.

With the "opposites attract" thing going for them on top of their earlier closeness-we don't get a lot of detail about their teen friendship- it's obvious that by movie standards these two are made (or remade, in Kim's case) for each other. Their first dates don't go well, despite Prentice's supreme effort to be sensitive. "I always thought you might be gay," he says. "I thought so too, for a while," Kim tells him. "I got it wrong." Always one to speak his mind Prentice tells her he thinks her solution was "pretty drastic."

The next date ends with them running out of a rowdy bar to avoid a fight, and Prentice resisting Kim's goodnight kiss: "I am straight, you know." "So am I," Kim says.

Then things really get bad. Prentice, who's been reading a book about gender issues in an effort to understand, asks Kim about the effects of the hormones she takes. Her graphic response excites him, which gets him so flustered he runs out in the street and noisily exposes himself to the neighborhood, getting them both arrested. An altercation in the police van, started by a cop putting his hand up Kim's skirt, causes even more trouble for them.

In the courtroom Kim, sounding like a latter-day Quentin Crisp, dismisses the policeman's actions: "You get used to that sort of thing."

A subplot shows the problems heterosexuals can have without changing gender. Saskia Reeves (Butterfly Kiss) plays Kim's sister (when she asks to borrow some clothes, Kim replies, "Take what you like. I stole the way I walk from you"), whose husband (Neil Dudgeon), a military drill instructor, married her knowing she was going to have another man's child.

Debuting screenwriter Tony Marchant covers all the bases without becoming didactic or cloying, or waving banners to make transsexualism a cause. He simply gives us two decent people with problems to work out and makes us hope they can work them out. When Kim tells the court, in answer to a question, "Our relationship doesn't have a precise nature. It never will," we want her to be wrong.

Director Richard Spence, making his first theatrical feature to be shown in the U.S., applies a functional style that, like Kim, doesn't call attention to itself. Flashiness would detract from the humanity of the piece and the characters.

Films like Different for Girls reinforce the gap between American and British cinema. We're making progress-I can't imagine Kevin Smith's Chasing Amy having been made here a few years ago, even by an independent-but I don't see us ever turning out a steady supply of adult, intelligent, entertaining movies as the British do consistently.

Different for Girls isn't trying to be the Philadelphia of transgender cinema; it's too light in tone for that. But as romantic comedies go it's got far more meat-sorry, Kim-than most.

Different for Girls opens Friday, Oct. 10 at Chicago's Music Box, (773) 871-6604.

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