A Smart Tale of Love, Acceptance

The family is giving a party, and upstairs someone small is getting ready. The dress, the earrings, the lipstick, everything is selected with care. But when the 7-year-old is introduced, the neighbors gasp, and so do the parents. For this perfectly dressed little girl is actually Ludovic, a little boy.

A serious comedy about gender confusion, “Ma Vie en Rose” (My Life in Pink) is a lively, high-spirited film that is at once light and serious, sentimental and smart. Though it’s the debut for its Belgian director, Alain Berliner, “Ma Vie” is so delicate and assured it manages to avoid the traps a venture like this might be thought to fall into.

Though it seems it must, “Ma Vie en Rose” has nothing to do with sexual orientation but says a great deal about childhood, fantasy, acceptance and the gap between adults and younger folks. For it’s in no way clear what Ludovic’s sexual orientation might or might not be as an adult, and that’s the point: For right now, no matter what anyone says, he is a child all the way.

A good deal of the credit for “Ma Vie’s” success must go to Georges du Fresne, without whose exactly calibrated performance as the 7-year-old Ludovic this picture can’t even be imagined. With huge saucer eyes in a grave, sphinx-like face that occasionally breaks into a pleased smile, the preternaturally calm Du Fresne gives the most guileless and natural impression of a boy who doesn’t understand why his conviction that he is really a girl should be a big deal to anyone.

But a big deal it most certainly turns out to be, though at first his father Pierre (Jean-Philippe Ecoffey) and mother Hanna (Michele Laroque) try to be amused by their son’s desire to dress up and resist any trims to his carefully maintained Prince Valiant hairstyle.

Equally understanding at first is his sports car-driving grandmother Elizabeth (Helene Vincent), who smiles on Ludovic’s identification with the Barbie-like TV character Pam and counsels understanding for someone searching for his identity.

But then Ludovic, who is nothing if not determined, starts insisting that he and Jerome, the son of a neighbor who just happens to be his father’s boss, are going to get married in the future “when I’m not a boy.” Ludo, as his parents call him, doesn’t want to cause trouble, but when what to him is a simple and straightforward desire gets combined with the boy’s will of iron, things soon spin out of control.

The problem, not surprisingly, is the adults, starting with the family’s neighbors and the parents of the other children at Ludo’s school. By turns unnerved, threatened and made insecure by the boy’s insistence, the nominal grown-ups show themselves to be more limited in their thinking than the children, eager to place inappropriate and offensive labels on anything that makes them uncomfortable.

Speaking of “Ma Vie” at its Cannes debut, director Berliner said his film “begins like Tim Burton’s ‘Edward Scissorhands’ and ends like Ken Loach” and then added, “in the middle it’s Billy Wilder.” This unexpected combination of bright fairy-tale fantasy, sharp satire and naturalistic empathy for its characters is what gives Berliner’s work (he also co-wrote the screenplay with Chris vander Stappen) more resonance than might be expected.

The other great thing about “Ma Vie en Rose” is its fairness. Though Ludo’s mother and father do not behave like a couple out of Parenting magazine, the film resists the temptation to portray them as ogres and is instead careful to cast them in an extremely sympathetic light. If in truth no one is lonelier than the child who is different, the plight of the people who love him, this graceful film insists, can be just as hard.

* MPAA rating: R, for brief strong language. Times guidelines: adult subject matter.

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‘Ma Vie en Rose’

Georges du Fresne: Ludovic

Michele Laroque: Hanna

Jean-Philippe Ecoffey: Pierre

Helene Vincent: Elizabeth

Julien Rievere: Jerome

Released by Sony Pictures Classics. Director Alain Berliner. Producer Carole Scotta. Screenplay by Chris vander Stappen and Berliner. Cinematographer Yves Cape. Editor Sandrine Deegen. Costumes Karen Muller Serreau. Music Dominique Dalcan. Production manager Daniel Delume. Set designer Veronique Melery. Sound Ludovic Henault. Running time: 1 hour, 28 minutes.

* At selected theaters throughout Southern California.