24th BFI London Lesbian & Gay Film Festival: TMC reviews Sex My Life

by Strawberry Cheesecake

What’s it like to be a trans person in Iran? This is the intriguing premise of Sex My Life and I suspect I’m the not the only who chose to see it on this basis alone. The film begins in a group therapy session in Tehran, as an affable though slightly off-putting male therapist inquires as to the current troubles of his clients. It then follows the lives of seven trans men and women from this group as they struggle to sustain their identity in circumstances which are less than amenable to this task. One is beaten and rejected by a father tired of the ‘shame’ she brings to the family. Another plays the protective brother to his younger sister’s suitors and wins nothing but her scorn. Some of the characters have stories which intersect while others remain distinct. Some characters are instantly amiable whereas others are more complex and inspire interest rather than immediate sympathy. The perpetually irritable and aggressive trans man who at one point starts a fight with a fellow taxi driver over some passengers being a case in point.  All in all Sex My Life had the makings of an intriguing film and yet it simply didn’t work for me.

I must confess that for much of this film I assumed it was a documentary. It was only when scene after scene posed the question of “who is filming this?” that  it started to dawn on me that this was not the case. As an angry father beat his transgender son I found myself wondering how the documentary crew could watch without intervening. When the camera crew had somehow gained access to a makeshift jail cell it became glaringly obvious that events were scripted. After the film I read that the director “tried to remove the barrio between documentary and fiction cinema”. While I can certainly understand how this concept might appeal to a high-minded film maker the sad fact is that it simply doesn’t work. Depending on how you look at it the result is either badly-acted fiction cinema or a fictitious documentary. Sex My Life exhibits a lack of narrative coherency which would be perfectly respectable in a documentary however, as the program notes make clear, this isn’t a documentary. It’s certainly sociologically interesting in so far as it portrays gender and sexual difference in a social and cultural context which many viewers will be unfamiliar with. However surely a film should achieve more than being a bit interesting? Given a subject matter which can inspire great pathos the result is sadly muted.