La Travestie

A stark departure from his other works, Yves Boisset's La Travestie is a tactically abrasive look at patriarchy and identity. Lawyer Nicole (Zabou Breitman, La Crise) is driven by frustration and male hypocrisy in both her personal and professional lives to leave her law firm and her hometown, and to reinvent herself as a man. Arriving in Paris, Nicole makes friends, and soon those friends turn to lovers, and lovers turn to enemies. She suffocates in the identities she creates and lets rejection make a villain of her, until insecurities turn to tragedy and she has nowhere to turn. Centring on female psychosexuality, without demonisation, the film presents challenging gender dynamics and trans imagery at a time when neither was common within mainstream cinema. It also utilises genre tropes to complex ends, never losing sight that it is, first and foremost, a character study with much to say about the plight of women in contemporary France in the late 1980s.