{"id":258,"date":"2021-05-26T20:08:15","date_gmt":"2021-05-27T00:08:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/totallyfilmi.toutes-directions.com\/totallyfilmi-wp\/?p=258"},"modified":"2021-05-26T20:08:17","modified_gmt":"2021-05-27T00:08:17","slug":"venus-dir-eisha-marjara-2017","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/totallyfilmi.toutes-directions.com\/totallyfilmi-wp\/2021\/05\/26\/venus-dir-eisha-marjara-2017\/","title":{"rendered":"Venus (dir. Eisha Marjara, 2017)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

This post first appeared on Totally Filmi on August 18, 2018.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

After struggling with gender identity, Punjabi Canadian Sid (Debargo Sanyal) finally makes the decision to live a life as a transgender woman outside the home, and to undergo the process of gender transition. Sid, born male, has always known she was a woman, but never took the step of dressing like one in public until making this important decision. As fate would have it, at the same time that Sid is planning for her new future and taking steps towards living her life fully as a woman, she meets Ralph (Jamie Meyers), a teenaged boy who, when confronted by Sid as to why he\u2019s hanging around her suddenly, reveals that Sid is his father \u2013 Sid was involved, briefly, with Ralph\u2019s mother (Amber Goldfarb), and Ralph, it seems, was the result.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Director Eisha Marjara (Desperately Seeking Helen<\/strong><\/em>) brings much warmth and wit to Venus<\/em><\/strong>. As much an exploration of modern, reconstituted family life and identity in a broader sense as it is about its transgender subject, the film could easily have fallen into stereotypes and given us typical, pat characters and situations. Instead, we have Sid, who has known her identity for a long time (her mother comments that for Halloween one year, Sid wanted to be a cowgirl, and Sid\u2019s mother made the costume out of one of her saris), but hasn\u2019t lived it fully. There\u2019s Sid\u2019s ex-partner (Pierre-Yves Cardinal), who wants to rekindle their romance, but still finds himself unwilling to share their relationship out in the open, especially with his own family. There\u2019s Ralph, at that age where he really needs a father figure, but who wants that kind of relationship from his biological father rather than his stepfather. Sid\u2019s mother is, on the one hand, accepting of Sid, and, yet, wishes she could have her son back \u2013 wanting the parameters of her own identity as a mother of a son who will marry and give her grandchildren to remain intact, even as she helps Sid alter women\u2019s clothing to fit better and offers her a bottle of nail polish she got as a two-for-one deal. Sid\u2019s father is, in the film\u2019s early stages, largely silent, leading us to believe, perhaps, that he is merely tolerating Sid, but as the film progresses we realize he has accepted Sid for who she is, and is helping his wife face up to Sid\u2019s reality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I can\u2019t help wishing, though, that a film that explores issues of identity hadn\u2019t stripped itself of its Canadian setting so markedly \u2013 although that does, I suppose, allow the joke about hormones in milk (they are banned in Canada) to pass. And I was a little troubled at the fact that Sid forges this relationship with her son based purely on Ralph\u2019s reading of his mother\u2019s diary, and that he doesn\u2019t make an effort, especially once he realizes that Ralph is avoiding raising the issue with his mother, to contact Ralph\u2019s mother sooner than he does and make her aware of the growing relationship between them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Venus<\/em><\/strong> does so much that is interesting in exploring Sid and the relationships she has with those around her, that it\u2019s disappointing that the writing and acting is, at times, a bit stilted and awkward, and the pacing flags in the latter part of the film. But I appreciated that the film didn\u2019t merely try to tick off boxes on the way to delivering a message \u2013 every time I braced myself for something to happen, the film surprised me by doing something different than I expected it would. In fact, I\u2019m not even sure the film has a message, other than life is messy and complicated, family is messy and complicated, and we all \u2013 no matter what our gender \u2013 muddle through somehow as we try to figure out who we are and what our place in the world is. Sid\u2019s transition is, of course, probably the most important and complicated step in her journey, but although it sits at the centre of who she is in this particular moment, it\u2019s also not all there is to Sid. Instead, it\u2019s about who Sid is in relation to a whole circle of people in her life, whether at work, the friends she hangs out with, her boyfriend, her parents, her son, and \u2013 most of all \u2014 how she stays true to herself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This review originally appeared on Bollyspice.com<\/a> as part of the coverage of the 2018 London Indian Film Festival.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This post first appeared on Totally Filmi on August 18, 2018. After struggling with gender identity, Punjabi Canadian Sid (Debargo Sanyal) finally makes the decision to live a life as a transgender woman outside the home, and to undergo the process of gender transition. Sid, born male, has always known…<\/p>\n

Continue ReadingVenus (dir. Eisha Marjara, 2017)<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":260,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[309],"tags":[347,346,348,305,349,345],"class_list":["post-258","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-london-indian-film-festival","tag-debargo-sanyal","tag-eisha-marjara","tag-jamie-meyers","tag-liff-2018","tag-pierre-yves-cardinal","tag-venus","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/totallyfilmi.toutes-directions.com\/totallyfilmi-wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/totallyfilmi.toutes-directions.com\/totallyfilmi-wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/totallyfilmi.toutes-directions.com\/totallyfilmi-wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totallyfilmi.toutes-directions.com\/totallyfilmi-wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totallyfilmi.toutes-directions.com\/totallyfilmi-wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=258"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/totallyfilmi.toutes-directions.com\/totallyfilmi-wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":261,"href":"https:\/\/totallyfilmi.toutes-directions.com\/totallyfilmi-wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258\/revisions\/261"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totallyfilmi.toutes-directions.com\/totallyfilmi-wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/260"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/totallyfilmi.toutes-directions.com\/totallyfilmi-wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=258"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totallyfilmi.toutes-directions.com\/totallyfilmi-wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=258"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totallyfilmi.toutes-directions.com\/totallyfilmi-wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=258"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}