Film Review: Girls & Boys

Thirty-three years after the premiere of Neil Jordan’s The Crying Game, a salacious story of Irish republicanism and London’s queer underbelly, the film continues to cast a long shadow over the idea of what Irish transgender film should be.

In it's most infamous scene, immortalised by a legion of parodies (you might remember Jim Carrey’s take in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective), Stephen Rea’s Fergus pukes and lashes out after discovering Dil, the woman he’s seeing (played by cis man, Jaye Davidson) has a penis. Fergus comes to “forgive” Dil in due time, but that wasn’t quite as memorable as the initial puking.

Girls & Boys, the debut feature from Donncha Gilmore, is not that film. Or at least it doesn’t want to be.

A tender indie romance with aspirations to treat Dublin as a romantic, enchanting backdrop (think Vienna in Before Sunrise), Girls & Boys focuses on a whirlwind Halloween night spent by two Trinity students who see themselves as being from different worlds.

Adam Lunnon-Collery’s Jace is a rugby player and business student who feels stifled by locker room masculinity. Liath Hannon’s Charlie meanwhile, is a trans film student who throws parties in squats and has bad sex with men who don’t want to be seen in public with her. After a few awkward initial meetings, the two strike up a bond when the Gardaí put a stop to Charlie’s party and they’re forced to make a quick getaway.

A lot of it plays out in rushed montage, but the weathered Super-8 film adds visual flavour to the film’s palette. Fionnuala McCormack’s cinematography is a real strong point, putting in a herculean effort to make 2020s Dublin appealing on screen. Charlie and Jace share tender conversations around a variety of local landmarks (the film is particularly in love with the LED lights of the Samuel Beckett Bridge), uncovering a mountain of things they have in common, despite appearing to be on diverging life paths.

That said, the film takes a dramatic turn in the back half of its 85 minute run-time, and it feels less confident during the intense scenes than it did with meet cutes, or the film’s highlight - a two-scene performance from a thick-accented coke dealer/aspiring stand-up comedian that the duo try to buy fireworks from. Girls & Boys builds momentum early on, which it struggles to maintain as it devolves into a series of tense arguments when Charlie and Jace unearth their shared past. Every scene feels like it could be the last after a certain point, and that can feel exhausting at times.

Hannon's performance is a landmark in its own right, one that frankly should have come much sooner: she is the first trans woman to lead an Irish feature film. She's already appeared in a number of shorts by trans filmmakers making the rounds of Ireland’s festival scene. Her past performances have shown her to be gut-bustingly funny, running around as a post-human with hands for boobs in Venus Patel’s Daisy: Prophet of the Apocalypse, and embodying the unhealthy obsession you can trap yourself in as an artist in Liadán Roche’s Terratoma. It was exciting to see her get the chance to carry a full-length feature like Girls & Boys, and she is one film’s most unassailable assets.

I’m not necessarily against having non-trans actors play trans characters (I have all the love in the world for David Duchovny’s Denise Bryson in Twin Peaks), but having Hannon in Girls & Boys allows her the opportunity to focus on playing the character of Charlie and what’s unique to her, rather than “playing trans”, like a strained and mannered Cillian Murphy in Breakfast on Pluto, or god forbid, Jared Leto’s turn in Dallas Buyers Club.

Despite Hannon's best efforts, there’s not a great deal of character for her to play. When the twist of the central conflict unravels, so too does the film’s conception of her character. Away goes the confident and assured artist of the film’s opening minutes, and in walks a woman craving a man’s validation. The film almost feels to nervous to flesh Charlie out, making it clear that this is Jace’s story far more than hers. In a climactic scene, Charlie tells Jace that she has saved him from his prison of toxic locker room masculinity. It's as if she's a prop in his journey than someone on her own, which, for all the film's political correctness, is not too dissimilar to the story of Fergus and Dil in The Crying Game all those years ago.

It’s reassuring in its own way, that trans women can now see themselves imperfectly reflected on the screen, the way that cis women have been able to for the entirety of film history. But it’s not too much to ask for more. In an active landscape for trans filmmakers both internationally and in Ireland, it’s hard not to feel like Girls & Boys’ cis gaze on trans womanhood is a little bit retrograde, even if it isn’t without its charms.

• Girls & Boys is out now. Written and directed by Donncha Gilmore. Starring Liath Hannon, Adam Lunnon-Collery. 

Olivia O'Ríada is a co-director of the Trans Image/Trans Experience Film Festival and has worked as a Young Audience Programmer for the Queen’s Film Theatre and the Dublin International Film Festival. She holds a BA in Media Studies & Music Technology from NUI Maynooth and an MA in Film from Queen's University Belfast.