My Life in Blue

The main attraction of this week’s discussion has been the movie Ma Vie en Rose. I thought that this was a fairly fitting title seeing as Ludo was criticized for everything he did, including his choice of clothing and hair style and was brutally rebuffed for repeatedly trying to wear pink dresses. This film brought up many different topics in class, some that I had noted while watching and some that had not even occurred to me.
Something that I did notice throughout the movie was the continual reference to how the father has changed. The family members said that he worked too much and was getting “as mean as Albert.” With this in mind, I found it difficult to be quick to judge the father, hoping that the man he used to be before moving to this neighborhood and receiving such pressure at his job. This is not something that was considered among many other classmates. In the end, my hope was fulfilled and it was the father, not the originally supportive mother, who wanted Ludo to be comfortable and would love him either way.
Another topic that we didn’t get a chance to talk about in class was the outcome in the change in Ludo’s mother. After someone wrote nasty comments about being ‘bent” on the garage door, his mother transformed. She no longer wanted to wait for Ludo to find his identity, for the psychologist to talk him out of it, for everyone in the neighborhood to loosen up. The transformation quickly went beyond just an exhaustion of patience, however, as she began to openly scream at Ludo, telling him that everything was his fault. I think that his young age made him not fully resent his mother for this and almost not even understand the gravity of what she was saying, however, because when he had the choice to stay with his grandma or move away with his family, he woke up crying for his mother. Even in the new town, at the end of the movie, his mother told him he was the cause for this, the cause for their unhappiness. Lastly, she results to physical violence when she thinks he has put on a dress by choice. I think the important thing to note here is the psychological effects of her actions and how Ludo will deal with them in the future.
This is something that I think oftentimes gets overlooked when talking about intersex children is that every decision family members make, every word that they speak, will have an impact on the child. Though Ludo was only seven and may have not understood everything that was happening to him and why people refused to understand his logic, he will grow up. He will never forget the abandonment by his older brother in the locker room, his father’s clenched fists and his mother’s blame. These events will surely influence the person that Ludo grows to be and what types of things he deals with mentally later on. I think that this is something that should always be remembered, whether your child is intersex, transsexual, heterosexual or the like…the way we treat our children shapes who they will be and how they perceive things and deal with them in the future.