The New Girlfriend-2015
Director Francois Ozon
Starring Romain Duris, Anais Demoustier
Scott’s Review #382
Reviewed March 5, 2016
Grade: B
The New Girlfriend (2015) is a French, and lighter, version of The Danish Girl, a similarly themed film also released in 2015.
The story involves gender identification confusion among the central character, though the time in The Danish Girl is the 1920s, The New Girl is set in present times.
The film begins with a brief montage of the lives of two best friends, Laura and Claire, inseparable as children, young adults, and even as married women.
Sadly, we learn that Laura has recently died of a terminal illness and this is where the film begins. Claire embarks on a unique friendship with Laura’s husband David when she catches him wearing female clothing and acting as a “mommy” to his infant daughter.
They form a bond and Claire agrees to harbor David’s secret and even accompany him in public as he slowly takes on the persona of “Virginia”.
I found the film quite compelling throughout most of the running time as we see David’s burning desire to dress as a woman and feel like a woman.
We mostly see the bond develop between Claire and David, who sometimes is Virginia, and other times David. Claire is happily married to her successful, handsome, husband Gilles and the three individuals are friends. They share dinners, tennis matches, and evenings consuming wine.
Gilles is unaware of David’s secret and begins to fear an affair between his wife and friend. Likewise, during moments, Claire imagines David and Gilles beginning a torrid affair.
Interestingly, the film does not go full steam ahead with the love triangle between Claire/Gilles/David (Virginia), a wise choice. That would have made the film more typical and perhaps even one-note.
Rather, the point is struggles by David to feel like a woman and how his friends support him. When he kisses Claire and snuggles with her, it is not sexual, it is to feel close to another woman.
This makes the film more character-driven.
As with many foreign-language films, The New Girlfriend is liberal with nudity, male and female. When nudity is featured in American films typically it is gratuitously or sexually.
This film is French, so the nudity is tasteful and even beautiful. When Claire is topless it is more expressive as the mystique of the female body than in a showing of a chesty woman, which Claire is not.
The ending slightly disappointed me. The idyllic, fairy tale way it wrapped was romanticized and unrealistic. I would have liked to have seen more of David/Virginia’s struggles and how his in-laws might have wrestled with their granddaughter being raised by a single man dressing as a woman.
Another flaw was the lack of explanation as to whether David, as a male, desired and yearned biologically to become a woman or if he was satisfied to dress up and publicly look like a woman.
The film chose not to go this route and undoubtedly would have made the film darker, containing a much deeper story.
Instead, The New Girlfriend (2015) was light, fun, and wholesome in its overall story.
