Mubi Monday: Monica (2022)

There's a very valid point that is often made in conversations about representation and equality. It isn't quite enough just to have more women onscreen, more varied ethnicities, and more roles for people who would previously not be afforded any of those opportunities. True equality comes from allowing those people on both sides of the camera to make mistakes, to be imperfect, and also sometimes outright awful. Monica is another step in the right direction, being the tale of a trans woman named Monica (Trace Lysette) that allows her to be a rounded and complex character without everything in her daily life revolving around her gender.

It's a simple premise. Monica has to return home to help care for her dying mother (Patricia Clarkson). There's a difficult history to wrestle with, considering her mother never accepted her as a woman, but Monica tries hard to keep the past in the past as she comes to terms with the mother she once knew being replaced by a whole new person she may actually have a chance to more strongly connect with.

Director Andrea Pallaoro, once again also working with his long-running collaborator Orlando Tirado on the screenplay, has spent his career making films about various women dealing with difficult situations. He has often helped himself a lot with great casting, and uses that part of the process once again here to give the film a major boost, but there's also an emotional honesty and insight in the writing that makes it surprising to see that two men were responsible for the screenplay.

It's much less surprising to see such a great performance in the lead role from Lysette, an actress who has been working hard to build an eclectic and impressive selection of roles for just over a decade now. She manages to show everything her character is going through without ever turning herself into a collage of frowns and sadness, always diving into herself to find one more reserve of inner strength as things get tougher, and it's rewarding to spend time with her on this part of her life journey. Clarkson is also unsurprisingly great, although hampered by the fact that her character is so seriously impaired by illness, and Emily Browning, Adriana Barraza, Joshua Close, and Jean Zarzour all do well enough to support the central mother-daughter relationship being explored. In fact, Browning does a bit more, somehow feeling much more integral to the whole thing just because of the way she seems to work so well in trying to facilitate a less painful experience for loved ones around her during this difficult time.

Monica isn't a film about a character defined by one thing, although that is a big part of their lives. It isn't a film overloaded with stereotypes and mis-steps. It admirably doesn't often feel like a film specifically about a trans woman (and I say admirably because it is able to show that the central character is defined by much more than that). It's a film about Monica, and I hope most viewers appreciate being able to spend some time in her company as much as I did.

8/10

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