GERMAN FILM FESTIVAL: Is it just a sign of the times, or is the idea of one of your parents changing their gender not as confronting as it used to be? There has to be some explanation for why a film brimming with potential cross-generational conflict is so tedious.
feels like just one long adolescent pout
Transpapa tells the story of Berlin teenager, Maren (Luisa Sappelt), who is suddenly reunited with her father whose current incarnation is as a post-op transsexual woman known as Sophie (David Striesow). Fed up with her smug birth mother and needing money for a driver’s license, Maren seeks out her long absent parent. Determined to ignore the obvious, Maren hopes to squeeze the required cash out of him/her, while the pair spend a week together in the Köln house where Sophie works as a housekeeper.
Maren is emotionally shut down, so when Sophie offers to answer any questions about her transformation, the teenager is not really interested. Instead she plays the miserable and embarrassed adolescent to the hilt. Unfortunately, this means that Transpapa remains a blandly filmed kitchen sink drama and feels like just one long adolescent pout.
Gradually, more details about Sophie’s new life emerge – some of them are even less palatable to Maren than having a transsexual for a parent. But dramatically speaking, few of these details are surprising, let alone shocking. The difficulty for Sophie is that, she must accept aspects of her previous life – a life she’s rejected – if she is going to reconnect with the daughter who knew her as another person.
Bonding over cigarettes and joints helps the relationship a bit, but not the drama which shuffles dully forward to a pre-ordained denouement. It seems that with her feature debut writer/director Sarah-Judith Mettke is quite lost with what to do with all that extra time that she has to fill in comparison to the short films she has made previously in her film career.
The only surprise in the whole story is the impulsive pilfering and swallowing by Maren of Sophie’s hormone tablets. This makes for a couple of interesting developments but raises the question of Maren’s allegedly repressed personality.
Before Maren is aware of her father’s post-op status, the film opens with scenes that imply that Maren is not just emotionally hindered, but sexually stunted as well. From the early moment she refuses to perform fellatio on a self-centered boy or slightly later, objects to the sounds of her mother (Sandra Borgmann) making love to her live-in boyfriend; the film implies Maren’s inability to accept her own body is at the source of her disgruntlement.
Sappelt gives an authentic performance as Maren as written, but her character arc doesn’t ring true, nor does it seem desirable – even if the film invites us to nod agreeably at its jokey finale. The film suggests – in partial jest – that Maren embrace her own femininity – just as her father has done. But its definition of the feminine is shallow and perhaps hints that the real reason for the dullness of Transpapa is that it plays at being radical, but in fact is inherently conservative.
