Ma Vie En Rose movie review

President Bill Clinton once said that his job as a parent was even tougher than that of being the most powerful man on earth. That is a remarkable statement because it tells us how important a parent's job is. And that job becomes even more challenging when your child is not "normal."

That is exactly the challenge that Hanna (played by Michele Laroque) and Pierre (played by Jean-Philippe Ecoffey) face when they realize that their son Ludovic (played extremely well by Georges DuFresne) thinks he is a girl. The parents and his grandma are fairly supportive hoping that things will gradully change but Ludovic refuses to change despite pleas from classmates, teachers, and a therapist. To make things even worse, he even wants to marry a neighborhood boy (who happens to be his father's boss's son) when they grow up.

We have all had someone in our school or family who wanted to be a different sex than what they were born in and in most cases they simply outgrow their desire and lead normal lives, like Ludovic eventually does. Having said that, there are some real cases when people are convinced they are in the wrong body and they can get help from doctors (a 12-year old German boy recently had gender reassignment surgery to become Kim from Tim) and psychologists.

For some reasons the movie is rated R though my reaction was that it is a movie one should watch as a family (and we thought that Grave of the Fireflies should have been rated R and it wasn't). It has no violence or sexual content at all and having a family discussion would be appropriate after watching it.

It is one of the finest movies (the movie is in French and its English title is "My Life In Pink") we have seen and no surprise then that it was honored at the Cannes and won the best foreign film award at the Golden Globes.