The new Brazilian film Don't Call Me Son is the complicated story of a handsome cross-dressing teenage boy who finds out he was stolen at birth and is then forced to move in with his wealthy biological parents. If the plot sounds unlikely, it's not.
Writer and director Anna Muylaert, who won last year's Berlinale Panorama Audience Award for her film The Second Mother, based her original script on a story that made headlines in Brazil two decades ago, she said in an interview with the Bay Area Reporter. While the story had already inspired several films and a soap opera, said Muylaert, those stories focused on the criminal mother who had abducted the boy.
"For me, the character of the son was always the most interesting," she wrote in an email. "What can you call yourself after you realize everything you thought was yours in fact was not?" The "core" of the film is "the formation of an identity," she said.
Don't Call Me Son stars Naomi Nero as Pierre, a teenager unsure of his gender identity but not yet committed to coming out as transgender. Pierre's entire life and sense of self are complicated when he learns that the woman who raised him is not his real mother, but stole him from the hospital shortly after birth. In fact he has a whole other birth family, whose expectations of their missing son and brother he may also never be able to meet.
The film opens with Pierre at an outdoor party with friends, radiating androgyny with his long hair, makeup and dark blue nail polish. He first nuzzles close to a boy on the dance floor, but then the film cuts away to him having sex with a girl in the bathroom, the camera panning down to show that Pierre is wearing a black lace G-string and garter belt.
Pierre's gender fluidity continues as he is shown rehearsing with a rock band, where he makes out with the male lead singer but is interrupted by a visit from a teenage girl, who apparently thinks she is his girlfriend.
The film shows Pierre at home, where he enjoys a close relationship with his single, working-class mom Aracy (Daniela Nefussi, who plays both mother roles). One day government officials show up to take Aracy and Pierre downtown for DNA tests. The tests show that Pierre had been stolen at birth, and now will be returned to the family who's been searching for him ever since.
The New York Times' Stephen Holden, who called it "a fascinating, sympathetic portrait of a lost boy abruptly thrown to the wolves. "