Trace Lysette is seductive and sorrowful as a conflicted woman returning to her roots
Monica (2022)
Now in theaters
Before you can understand this movie’s Monica (Trace Lysette) as a trans woman, you’ll have to realize she’s a creation. Not of medical procedures or artfully adapted clothing and makeup, but of iron will.
Writer-director Andrea Pallaoro and co-screenwriter Orlando Tirado make sure we respect the process that’s brought Monica to where she is when we meet her.
The trans actress Lysette (who’s also a producer) seems not just to portray Monica but to come to her rescue when she seems to fail in our eyes.
And tumble she does, despite all she has going for her.
In her mid-30s, curvy like a swimsuit model, her burnished red-brown hair worn in seductive strands or elegantly swept up, Monica fills out women’s dresses as assuredly as if they’d been designed for her.
But you only need to look into her sad, transfixed, amazingly still eyes to worry about where her story might be headed. She’s a wounded warrior.
What’s been her choice of weapon? Knock them dead from the moment they look at you. Leave no doubt they have a woman on their hands.
And it’s worked. Men, total strangers, keep hitting on her, and we see why. There isn’t a hint of fakery about her femininity.
When she dances alone across a room, bopping to the music, her eyes and hips swiveling to the beat, she’s magnetically sexy, bewitching.
But we’ll soon learn that when she looks directly at another person, her eyes lock in cool defiance: So, you’re wondering about my sexuality? Give me one reason I should help you with that.
Inner-directed, which is social psychology jargon for someone not to be messed with, could be Monica’s middle name.
We first meet her in a large city which feels like L.A. She’s depressed. For reasons we don’t know, friends, ex-lovers, even casual ex-hookups rarely return her phone calls.
On the other hand, beguiled clients do. She gives massage treatments, but we soon realize she’s a sex worker, and we hear her side of phone conversations with a satisfied partner, so she’s clearly mastered her body’s capabilities.
Surprisingly, we then hear her on the phone inform someone on the other end of the line that she’ll be hitting the road and will arrive in a couple of days.
What’s obviously a long drive brings her back to the home where she was raised, as a boy.
Clearly, it’s been a couple of decades since she left. Her brother Paul (Joshua Close) greets her in astonishment, declaring he’d never have recognized her.
Still, he welcomes her return to visit their ailing mother Eugenia (Patricia Clarkson).
Eugenia’s cancer is advancing, and she’s often disoriented, not sure of who’s taking care of her or why, refusing her medications, submitting only to the ministrations of Leticia (Adrian Barraza), a steadfast family friend.
Paul, his wife Laura (Emily Browning) and Monica all agree that Eugenia wouldn’t be able to comprehend – or do they mean withstand? – the news that her son, now a trans woman, has come home.
So, she’s told that Monica is “someone who’s volunteered to help.” Eugenia clearly doesn’t recognize her transformed son, so she grudgingly accepts yet another care person.
Thus, the movie pulls us into its strange illusion of “recognition” that's no such thing. Of “acceptance” that's actually denial. Of a returned family member who feels utterly estranged.
Lysette gives one of the most powerful performances I’ve seen this year. She puts her understanding as a trans actress at the service of the unmoored, yearning Monica.
The movie has no ring of triumph. Monica has more work to do. She’s traversed extremes. Maybe now it’s time to see what the center has to offer.
Within a few days, Monica has had enough of pretending, tells her family she can’t bear the sham “closeness” any longer, and packs up to leave.
Yet as she drove off, her eyes filled with tears, I heard myself muttering to myself in my seat, Turn around and go back there, Monica. Make them see you.
To my immense relief, she does exactly that. A slow semi-bond with the family begins to take shape.
Paul and Laura’s two older children are nine and ten years old, and with childlike acceptance they don’t even think to question Monica’s sexuality.
She’s soon teasing and wrestling around with them. The baby, perhaps two years old, instantly quiets when Monica holds him.
Crucially, she intensifies her caring for Eugenia. There’s a moment when she helps Leticia lift the ill, weakened matriarch out of a bath and wrap her in a warm robe.
The gratitude in Eugenia’s eyes seems to signal that she may be sensing what’s behind this name “Monica”. Is a light of recognition dawning in her eyes?
Later, when Eugenia wakes in the middle of the night moaning in distress, Monica embraces and calms her, slowly coaxing her back to sleep. Paul lowers his reserves, too, when he and his returned sister share childhood memories.
Monica (far right), Eugenia (holding her hand) and their newly re-bonded family
But Monica still has personal demons to fight. Life in the household goes quiet after dark, so she begins to prowl the town bars, looking for hookups.
We see one encounter play out as cold business sex that’s callously impersonal and heartbreaking to watch.
Monica has fortified her identity. But what if, paradoxically, being strong wards off closeness and invites hostility instead?
Pallaoro as director, working with cinematographer Katelin Arizmendi and editor Paola Freddi, has devised a stark style to tell this off-center, off-kilter story.
Strikingly, he often includes only portions of a body within a shot, maybe a head and one arm, but no torso. Or he’ll shoot dialogue with only one character in the frame.
Even more resonantly, the movie has no score. All the music consists only of what the characters themselves hear on car radios, in bars and restaurants, or performed in public spaces.
It’s nearly all harsh and rebarbative, meant to scrape nerves, including ours. The one musical exception at the end turns out to be immensely moving.
This visual and aural rigor – with nearly everything we see cut off, foreshortened, darkened or attenuated – drives the story into an uncomfortable region of the mind. Was this family not bonding even way back when Monica was a boy?
That dysfunction may have driven Monica away as a teenager as much as her struggle to find a sexual identity.
We feel it in the aching regret in Eugenia’s face as she finally seems to gaze at Monica with a recognition that it’s actually her long absent son behind those beautiful eyes.
Patricia Clarkson is shattering as a mother who struggles to recognize her returning child
Or maybe not. We can’t be sure. In Clarkson’s luminous performance Eugenia ascends to a new height, trying to summon a last-ditch courage that’s almost a match for Monica’s tenacity.
Lysette gives one of the most powerful performances I’ve seen this year. She puts her understanding as a trans actress at the service of the unmoored, yearning Monica.
I ached for the woman she’d become, and wished she’d deploy her beauty and intelligence beyond what she clearly feels is degrading sex work.
But that struggle lies ahead of her. I admire the moviemakers for not tying matters up neatly.
The movie has no ring of triumph. Monica has more work to do. She’s traversed extremes. Maybe now it’s time to see what the center has to offer.
It’s the middle range of feeling that Monica’s not been able to move into, and at least some of the time that may be where life is most fruitfully lived.
Just as important, she needs to discover what she can give to people who won’t ever fully understand her journey.
That gap doesn’t mean she and her family can’t reach out for and support one another.