A Hopeful Vision of Community
Film adapts novel by Ronald M. Schernikau
BY STEVE ERICKSON
Films about trans people
made by cisgender directors
tend to be intended
as explainers. Even with
their best intentions, they tend to
medicalize trans identity, forcing it
into a narrative about dysphoria,
coming out, and surgical transition.
But what about people who
live confi dently in a milieu where
it’s fairly acceptable to be trans
and queer?
“So Pretty,” directed by trans
director Jessica Dunn Rovinelli,
speaks for them, with a perspective
coming within the community.
Three of its central quintet of characters
are trans, but it doesn’t call
attention to that fact. “So Pretty”
describes a search for communal
living and real resistance against
rising fascism with a style as radical
as its politics.
“So Pretty” adapts Ronald M.
Schernikau’s novel “so schon,”
transplanting the action from ‘80s
Berlin to present-day New York.
(The fi lm was completed two years
ago.) Its characters read excerpts
from the novel in a park, standing
before a microphone. Tonia
and her boyfriend Franz (Thomas
Love) are working on a translation
of the novel, but Schernikau’s work
quickly bleeds into their everyday
life. Reading the book and fi nding
inspiration in it collapses into using
it as a model for community.
While the fi lm has little narrative
momentum, Tonia and Franz hang
out with their friends Paul (Edem
Dela-Seshie), Erika (Rachika Samarth)
and Helmut (Phoebe De
Grost) in their apartment, having
sex in various pairings. At a protest
at Trump Tower, Paul’s leg is
injured by a cop and Erika is arrested,
which adds pressure to
their small cell.
“So Pretty” depicts sex frankly
without exploitation. Its characters
have little use for monogamy:
in one scene, three people lie nude
in bed. Rovinelli frames them in a
long shot that exposes one man’s
penis but avoids fetishizing any
of the people or their body parts.
“So Pretty” depicts sex frankly without exploitation.
Three of the central characters in “So Pretty” are trans, but the fi lm does not use the word “trans.”
They also embrace kink playfully.
Scenes where trans people, preceding
transition, look at their
genitalia unhappily in their mirror
and experience dysphoria are
a cliché. “So Pretty” subtly refers
to this trope and subverts it with a
shot where Tonia and Franz’s happy
cuddling is refl ected in a mirror.
As a rule, the fi lm uses long shots
100 YEAR FILMS
100 YEAR FILMS
to show the bodies of its cast while
retaining some distance. It bares
the actors without chopping their
bodies into parts for the audience’s
delectation.
Rovinelli’s fi rst feature, “Empathy,”
was a docu-fi ction about a
non-binary sex worker struggling
with their addiction to heroin. (She
also wrote music criticism for the
FILM
now-defunct website Tiny Mixtapes.)
Written together with its
subject/actor, it strove to avoid the
exploitation common in documentaries
about marginalized people
and function as a true collaborative
vision.
“So Pretty” continues this quest
to envision better possibilities
for art and life. Simultaneously,
it avoids easy topical references.
Trump goes unmentioned, and the
characters’ protest signs “femme
as in f**k you” and “this art historian
kills fascists” are vague
enough to serve many situations.
Rovinelli deliberately avoided using
the words “trans” and “queer.”
The style of “So Pretty” does not
rhyme with the warmth it depicts.
Especially in its early scenes, the
camera has a mind of its own, as
interested in the apartment’s décor
as the characters. In 360-degree
pans, it fl oats past people as
they converse and takes in the
entire space. (A painting of Lenin,
with a purple smudge of lipstick on
his forehead, hangs on the wall.)
Rovinelli pays close attention to
objects as a material presence and
an infl uence on people’s moods.
The camera movements and preference
for long shots over closeups
embrace the beauty of the
apartment’s décor, which is soft
and light. The fi lm also lets events
run in real time. When Tonia goes
dancing at a club, the scene lasts
the entire length of the EDM song
playing. A similar scene near the
end holds the camera back as a
distant performer plays electronic
music onstage amidst fl ashing
blue lights.
“So Pretty” responds to American
life’s oppressiveness with a
hopeful vision of community. Like
Ephraim Asili’s recent “The Inheritance,”
about a collective of Black
radicals in Philadelphia, “So Pretty”
looks for solutions to the atomization
of American individualism.
Even if it refl ects a certain amount
of anger, its tone is fairly mellow
and gentle. In its style, it strives for
ways to avoid the received notions
➤ SO PRETTY, continued on p.19
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