Photo: Lucía Puenzo's XXY
There's a secret at the heart of XXY, but the real mystery is why writer-director Lucía Puenzo insists on unnecessary symbolic gestures for a story otherwise told with delicacy, restraint, and maturity. At a seaside Uruguayan village, 15-year-old Alex (Ines Efron) and her parents have their self-imposed isolation interrupted by the arrival of a surgeon, Ramiro (Germán Palacios), his wife Erika (Carolina Pelereti), and their son Alvaro (Martin Piroyansky). Alex and Alvaro strike up an uneasy, highly charged friendship that develops into something more complex when the boy discovers the reason behind Alex's strange behavior and alienation from the community: she's a hermaphrodite. Nick Schager
There's a secret at the heart of XXY, but the real mystery is why writer-director Lucía Puenzo insists on unnecessary symbolic gestures for a story otherwise told with delicacy, restraint, and maturity. At a seaside Uruguayan village, 15-year-old Alex (Ines Efron) and her parents have their self-imposed isolation interrupted by the arrival of a surgeon, Ramiro (Germán Palacios), his wife Erika (Carolina Pelereti), and their son Alvaro (Martin Piroyansky). Alex and Alvaro strike up an uneasy, highly charged friendship that develops into something more complex when the boy discovers the reason behind Alex's strange behavior and alienation from the community: she's a hermaphrodite. Nick Schager
