Izumi Sexy, making her screen debut. As someone who watches “Kimama ni Ran-Jelly,” a freewheeling YouTube show featuring drag queens chatting and goofing around, this was simply a must-see. And yes, today was wonderful, as always.
What was the Blue Boy Trial?
I watch “Nai-mon Channel” on YouTube, especially “Kimama ni Ran-Jelly.” Edamame Junko is my favorite. I also love Izumi Sexy and Hoebeni Chiiko. When I heard Izumi Sexy was in a film, I went to the evening show in Hibiya.
“Blue Boy Trial” is an original film based on real events from the 1960s. In that period, gender-affirming surgery was treated as illegal. A doctor who performed it was arrested, and the story unfolds around the trial that followed. Director Kasho Iizuka, lead actor Miyu Nakagawa, and others involved are themselves transgender, I learned.
I knew about the case, so I’d done my reading before going. But I’d soon realize that “reading up” had not been quite enough.
Watching without knowing
It was my first time seeing Miyu Nakagawa.
While watching, I found myself thinking, “Maybe they cast a slightly taller woman for the part.” She was so feminine, no, simply a woman, that I even thought, a little rudely, “It’s a film, so fair enough, but maybe it’s not all that convincing.”
I was watching without knowing that Miyu is transgender. Only afterward did it click: ah, so that’s it. That natural, that much a woman.
Honestly, I wish I’d known beforehand. I think I’d have watched it differently. Then again, I know, I know, it’s my own fault for not reading more carefully.
The air of another era
People smoking indoors as a matter of course, the clothes everyone wore, the period seeped through in every corner of the frame.
The mindset, too, carried a faintly patriarchal air that’s hard to imagine today. Understanding of transgender people was, of course, clearly lacking back then.
And yet, even in that era, there were so many people quietly suffering over it. Even then, there were a few who understood, who fought to be of help. Through the trial, things you’d rather not see come into view. But so do the things you really must see. The struggles and the pain of these people were there on the screen, unmistakably.
Wrapping up
As I was riding the escalator afterward, two people who’d apparently just seen the same film, both transgender, were standing behind me.
“Everyone was amazing! But that lawyer? Hmm, maybe a bit off. Something about it just doesn’t quite land, you know?”
Their candid impressions drifted right into my ears, my Dumbo ears, apparently.
I’m not transgender myself, so of course I can’t speak about this film as someone with that lived experience. But there it was: a film in which trans people played trans characters, watched by trans people, who were laughing and talking it over so honestly. That sight is, somehow, what stayed with me most.
Also, Ahko (Izumi Sexy), so good.
