Existence. The father recalled how Charlie was reaching for women’s things as a child, which, as it seemed to him, remained in the past, but the fourteen-year-old son again began to get weird, secretly dressing up in his sister’s dresses, and, pinned to the wall, admitted that he never ceased to feel like a girl, causing shock in his parents, who individually perceived the condition of a teenager who refuses to get rid of the “bad habit”, and if the mother was ready to take on the new look of a young man, then dad did not know where to go, and, what is worse, how to live with such a “miracle”.
Rebecca Fortune may have been inspired by 2007’s A Girl Like Me: The Gwen Araujo Story, about the true misadventures of transsexual Eddie Arahoe, and Peter Machen may have remembered him when he wrote his script, which has several parallels with the story written by Shelley Evans for Agnieszka Holland’s film, including a dedicated mother willing to lay her bones on her own blood.
In comparison with the one, the ribbon of Rebecca Fortune is noticeably simpler and not so tragic in content, marked by the dramatic reaction of society to the twists of a young man who is unable to explain his condition to others, and those, in turn, unsuccessfully puzzle over the question: “Why does he do this?”, habitually looking for personal intent in the phenomenon of nature, which just creates what he does.
The brightly flared talent of Harry Gilby, who found himself in a difficult situation, manages to play well with a plastic nature, organically transferring the young actor from one hypostasis of Charlie to another, by the power of his image penetrating the chronically predetermined turn of opinions placed by the plot on the scale of tolerance from maternal love, through friendly participation (a black classmate), to the boundless hatred of the crowd, catching up fear with the shadow of the mourning finale of another story, so that you can not say that now those times are not.