Life with Pinky Dots

Ma Vie en Rose. Directed by Alain Berliner. Written by Alain Berliner and Chris van der Stappen. 1997. 89 min.

Color acts as a feature of political display and a means of subjectivity formation. A bright, stylish, flamboyant pink, for example, remains the most popular representation of both performed gender and masqueraded sexuality. From race to sexuality to class, color matters, ¹ and in Ma Vie en Rose the color that matters is a definitive pink. How queer is pink? How white is pink? How girl is pink? How pink is queer? Ma Vie en Rose, Alain Berliner's surprisingly toned and attuned portrait of a seven-year-old garçon-fille, celebrates pink as the color-trace of gender, sexuality, and race.

Ma Vie en Rose might be thought of as a hybrid of fairy tale and freak show. Ludovic (the fabulous Georges Du Fresne), the seven-year-old, lives happily in the suburbs with his nuclear family. Dad (Jean-Philippe Ecoffey) is a publicist, mom (Michèle Laroque) is homey and sensitive, big sister is on the verge of puberty, the two brothers are dull as posts, and grandma (the dashing Hélène Vincent) is a bit queer herself. Ludo, who thinks of himself as a girl, openly expresses and embodies his taste for being a she until his bold wedding game with Jérôme (Julien Rivière), the boy next door, sets things queer in the pastel-colored suburban community and provokes a family crisis. Jérôme also happens to be the son of dad's quasi-Christian fundamentalist boss.

Other films have addressed the questions of identity and of teen and child desires through the fantasy of realness, from Dottie Gets Spanked (dir. Todd Haynes, 1993) to Heavenly Creatures (dir. Peter Jackson, 1994) and The Hanging Garden (dir. Thom Fitzgerald, 1997). ² Although each of these films unfolds dramatically in a different direction, they all represent sexuality as a relational and contextual practice. In such a context the coming-out moment might be said to be demarcated by pink dots (such as those introducing Ludo's fantasies in the film), which mark the porous yet real boundary between heteronormativity and queerness. While most such films play with questions of puberty and sexual identity through the trauma or beauty of coming out, Ma Vie en Rose goes further in touching the core of the predicament of l'âge de raison (versus the "age of innocence"): the development of the sovereign individual capable of distinguishing truth from fantasy, good from evil. Ma Vie en Rose is not about coming out; on the contrary, it ambiguously plays with the question of coming in as a queer child. There is no tension here about "discovering" sexuality, since Ludo is not discovering anything. He is waiting to get his X chromosome and take it back home, fully to become the girl he wishes to be.

Pink Ethics

One might be tempted to see Ma Vie en Rose as part of the trend in films about transvestism. ³ I argue instead that it treats sexuality less as a question of trans- or cross-gender culture in its political dimensions than as a rearticulation of heterosexual social values and their reliance on the sovereign individual, here mediated by the garçon-fille from a white middle-class suburban family. Keeping at bay identity as a political agenda, the film embraces a long-standing tendency in European films and cultures of understanding sexuality within humanist and essentialist traditions, in which the positioning of the other (here the "queer") as absent is necessary to free sexuality from the limits of physicality (and, by extension, from cultural contingencies). In such a model sexuality is not an identity but an absolute, libertarian, individualist, and idealist mode of freedom. In Ma Vie en Rose that mode of freedom is transmogrified into fantasy, and Ludo's provides an image of that...