A trans woman and her dying mother reconnect, tentatively, in ‘Monica’
Several times during “Monica,” the title character rages against absent people or at herself. These episodes don’t, however, foreshadow an emotional blowout between the drama’s central figures: Monica, a transgender woman, and her mother Eugenia, who disowned her years before. Aside from those few excited moments, the film is deliberate, shadowed and whispery. Rather than struggle to a breakdown or breakthrough, mother and child tiptoe to acceptance.
This works mostly because director and co-writer Andrea Pallaoro was wise – or fortunate – enough to cast Patricia Clarkson as Eugenia and trans actress Trace Lysette as Monica. Both use small gestures and guarded expressions to convey a shifting, and believable, array of emotions.
Severely ill and probably dying, Eugenia can be abrupt and abrasive. But she finds comfort in the touches of her young grandchildren and the newly arrived Monica, whose precise identity she is never told but seems eventually to intuit. Monica resents how she was once treated but can’t help but feel tender toward her now-diminished mother. The long-absent daughter is also soothed by the welcome offered by her niece and nephews and their mother, Laura (Emily Browning), the sister-in-law she’d never previously met.
It’s Laura who tracks down Monica and encourages her to travel from California to her hometown in Ohio. There, the exiled daughter tentatively reconciles with her brother, Paul (Joshua Close), and bonds with his and Laura’s kids. Introduced to Eugenia only as someone who’s there to help, Monica starts to assist her mother’s nurse, Letty (Adriana Barraza).
The slim and open-ended story is recounted indirectly, with relatively little dialogue. Monica doesn’t divulge much of herself to the viewer, except during a few one-sided phone conversations with men who have disappointed her. Pallaoro and Orlando Tirado’s terse script distills her life to silent and solitary moments. In one, she injects an unknown substance – presumably some form of hormone therapy – into her thigh. In another, she play-acts a writhing sexual scenario, apparently for a live-streaming audience.
In her private moments, Monica is often accompanied by a soundtrack of hip and mostly British art-punk oldies by the likes of New Order, Pulp and Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark. She’s also seen wearing a Cocteau Twins T-shirt. Whether this reflects the taste of the character or her creator is unclear.
Pallaoro is a U.S.-based Italian director whose style owes less to Hollywood than to European art films. (His introductory shot of Monica in a tanning salon seems an homage to the opening of “Gomorrah,” the acclaimed 2008 Italian gangster movie.) Cinematographer Katelin Arizmendi filmed “Monica” in a boxy, near-square format that represents the title character’s circumscribed life. Monica is often seen cornered in tight spaces, or partly outside the frame, or largely hidden, whether by a beaded curtain or by her own lush red mane. Frequently, she’s glimpsed only in a mirror or other shiny surface, as if to suggest she’s as much image as person. The filmmakers’ treatment of their protagonist is sympathetic, if often as one-dimensional as those reflections.
“Monica” is moody, slow-moving and stronger on style than characterization, yet Lysette and Clarkson endow it with feeling. This is a broken-family drama that culminates not with shouted recriminations or smashed crockery, but with baths, massages and gentle kisses.