Recensioni de* critic*

Though its focus on blurred genders makes it part of a fashionable trend in movies, the film doesn't deliver much in the way of dramatic power or unexpected revelation, and its recurrent time-shifting, while intellectually apposite, further diminishes its narrative momentum.

Although Ms. Rohrwacher captures Mark's uncertain, shifting physicality, the movie doesn't always succeed in getting inside the character's head. Mark's reluctance to speak sometimes plays like a screenwriting crutch — a way to avoid writing dialogue that reflects complex motivations.

In this hushed, prickling drama, Laura Bispuri creates and erases binaries with every swivel of the camera, drawing out whole stories from soft glances, silences, shadows, and the loom of the northern Albanian mountains, the hard faces of men.

Bispuri sprinkles details of Mark's past throughout the narrative without reducing his current dilemma to a binarism of either-or transgender confusion. In fact, past and present are meshed into an assemblage of vacillations across time, rather than *between* times. Even on a structural level, the film is less oriented around quantifiable transitions than pieces of greater significance that seldom configure neatly into a gradually emerging puzzle.

Laura Bispuri's debut feature plays with time throughout, the main effect of which is to distract us from the lack of dramatic momentum — Hana comes to live with Lila in Italy after both "parents" die, making it a simple matter of time before her repressed identity emerges. A few striking grace notes — a faraway shot of snow sliding off the roof of a cottage is especially memorable — enrich the inert narrative, if only to a point.

...It's that kind of empathetic attention to emotional complexity that makes Sworn Virgin more than a heavy-handed issue-of-the-week topical polemic. Mark's desire to at least partly return to her former identity as Hana isn't treated as a regression, but as the natural dilemma of a thinking and feeling human being open to unfamiliar experiences, regardless of societal dictates.

In the film's first half, the gender politics are laid out in a too blunt and schematic manner, sapping a lot of strength from the grim narrative... However, Sworn Virgin still merits mention as a promising first feature. Once the film's politics have been laid out, Bispuri proves herself a very keen director, conveying her protagonist's emotional struggle to recover her sexuality with remarkable tact and insight.

[Rohrwacher] deftly assists the film's ambiguities, carefully playing Hana/Mike as a person who never seems quite comfortable in either skin. If she scarcely looks more manly in her bowl cut and denim jacket than Barbra Streisand did in "Yentl," that's surely the point; her inflections of swagger, even as she embarks on a return to womanhood, are affecting for appearing so studied.