Not just another woman in search of a dream
“I’m already a woman. I want to have surgery to reward myself, to be prettier. It’s a biological disorder, a genital issue. That’s the contradiction I see. So I would reinvent myself completely,” says 30-year-old Yermén, a Chilean transsexual who’s signed up for a TV contest in which the main prize is a plastic surgery of choice. She also says she’d stop being a Tarot reader and move out of her neighbourhood in the outskirts of Santiago so that people won’t say “that’s the faggot who got himself a pussy.”
Often, Yermén’s identity bothers the people she meets. There are always noisy, judgmental neighbours who won’t mingle with her and others who have fun mocking her. But she’s got her friends as well, a small circle of women whom she trusts and with whom she shares her every day. Like Yermén, they also think a sex-change operation is a great idea.
If she had the means to afford it, she would’ve done years ago. But she barely makes ends meet, so her only hope is to be selected at the TV contest — the place where she meets a friendly young black woman who also wants to have surgery, but to look like model Naomi Campbell and be famous as well. People who want to become somebody else. And yet be themselves.
Nicolás Videla’s and Camila Donoso’s feature Naomi Campbel — no es fácil convertirse en otra persona / Naomi Campbel: It’s Not Easy To Become a Different Person is, first and foremost, a sensitive and touching examination of the singularities of a unique woman with a very personal — and urgent — dream, but also of the many similarities she shares with ordinary women. It’s not really about the objective traits that make you different, but instead about how you live your life in all its subjectivity when you are different and alike at once.
The point is that for Paula “Yermén” Dinamarca it seems there’s so much more she could enjoy if she had her surgery. That’s why her life now is always permeated with a certain sense of loss. In a different sense, but like everybody else’s.
By the way, this notable Chilean opus is neither a documentary nor a fiction film. Yermén does, of course, exist and she does long for a sex change operation. But a scripted story was written for the film — for instance, the TV contest and her job are fictional. All the actors are non-professional actors who play themselves and express their daily realities. But many scenes are downright staged, and then combined with rich amateur video footage shot by Yermén herself. Not that you are going to be able to distinguish what’s “real” and what’s “fiction” — and it doesn’t really matter if you don’t. What matters are the stories. Just like Yermén defies conventional and strict gender notions, so does the film. Both of them in a very compelling manner.
With a subtly fascinating cinematography and a great use of context and locations, Naomi Campbel is absorbing, profound, and authentic. Quite an uncommon combination.
