Jessie Jeffrey Dunn Rovinelli's So Pretty is showing February 24 - March 24, 2020 on MUBI as part of the series Direct from the Berlinale.
The question of the trans image on film has often been centered around seeing the film image as opposed to the making of the film image. There has been yearning to see the images of affirmative visibility after decades of negative, harmful, or fraudulent trans images on-screen. Ultimately, these conversations and contentions about the trans image on-screen have slowly given way to art being created as a reaction against or commenting on images such as the well-worn negative media tropes or the class and racially tiered “visibility for some, but not all” that still fails to account for the most vulnerable in the community. And there is also the fact that aesthetics must become synonymous in any discussion about portraying trans people on-screen, that humanizing or giving dimension to a trans person does not have to come off like a public service announcement. To move forward and fully progress and evolve as an art form, the cinema needs trans people creating their own image and film language on-screen, making the image about how trans people see the world or the worlds they want to see on film. In that regard, So Pretty by Jessie Jeffrey Dunn Rovinelli should be among the films to build from this new trans film image. It is a bold, refreshing, sexy, and beautifully rendered film of warmth, intelligence, and desire whose mere existence is both long overdue and also worth the wait to see such an original, breathtaking work.
Rovinelli wrote in a Filmmaker Magazine piece on the pre-production of So Pretty, funded as a Kickstarter project, that much like her feature film directorial debut Empathy (2016) as “working within a set of assumptions about sex work, drug films and hybrid documentaries, So Pretty will make use of a set of assumptions about what trans and queer films are supposed to be.” Rovinelli aimed to make a film “that focuses not simply on the hardships of being transgender, but the new aesthetic, narrative and imaginative possibilities our lives can open up.”
So Pretty is about a group of young queer artists and activists who fall in and out of love as they find solidarity together in their interior spaces. It is partly a hangout film, with filmed observations of uninterrupted scenes of overlapping dialogues about politics, art, identity, and pleasure among characters who are predominantly trans and gender queer. Utopia resides in these spaces. So Pretty is also an adaptation of sorts.
The first interior shot of the film are two characters together (played by Thomas Love and Rovinelli herself) as lovers in bed in a Brooklyn apartment. They are reading aloud a book together. The book’s cover is black with a purple title in German:So Schön, meaning “so beautiful” or “so pretty.”The film is inspired by the German gay novel by Ronald M. Schernikau. Schernikau was born in East Germany, came of age in West Germany, and in his late teens published his debut bildungsroman Kleinstadtnovelle (The Small-Town Novella, 1980), which became a national sensation. He spent his twenties as an outspoken communist and journalist in Berlin who was brash and intelligent through his writings that interconnected his leftist politics and queer sexuality, and ultimately died of AIDS complications back in East Germany in 1991. Schernikau’s work has seldom been published in English and so the moments of translation of his prose in Rovinelli’s So Pretty are itself something that adds another layer of revelation in this film. Schernikau did offer some of his characters, often said to be extensions of his own life, gender fluidity and non-conformity, though he did not directly write about the transgender experience. In that respect, So Pretty functions as a multifaceted work of adaptation and translation. German becomes English. Gay becomes not just the only representation of queerness, but instead now represents trans, non-binary, and gender non-conformity of different races. 1980s gay Berlin amid the Cold War becomes contemporary Brooklyn. Characters within Rovinelli’s film directly speak from Schernikau’s translations in various interstitials but these characters are also inserting themselves into the narrative throes of the film (they are credited with the names of the characters in the original So Schön). Queer love and leftism are interwoven in Schernikau’s work as they are in Rovinelli’s, with her recontextualizing the novel’s utopian visions to underline the current political moment. Filmed are real protests against injustice and images of the Trump Tower loom, acknowledging that symbols, structures, and systems want these characters and their identities erased. So Pretty is a hyper-conscious adaptation and political parable, but the characters in their relationships, romances, identities, and politics in constant negotiation also reveal the complications in adaptation and translation in language, art, and the interpersonal. So Pretty is self-reflexive at its core; the fluid, transformative power of art moving from one person to another or a different art form to another feels, in Rovinelli’s hands, a kindred spirit to those who seek to transform and remake their own sexual and gender identities.
Rovinelli’s camera in action immediately feels like a jolt into a new kind of trans aesthetic, one that completely engages the viewer and works in harmony with the textual experiment she undertakes. Rovinelli, a skilled film colorist and editor, shot So Pretty in a beautifully grainy 16mm. Those textures provide warmth, such as in the bed scene of the two lovers reading Schernikau interchangeably in German and English. The camera glides to their modest mattress on the floor as they remark of being in the same position, lying together in bed, as the characters they are reading. They are in minimal clothing and not covered up, spooning as Rovinelli’s character latches onto the book’s protagonist of Tonio, but noting the gender difference: “I am also not a ‘Tonio,’ I am a ‘Tonia’,” the name she is referred to as for the rest of the film. Love’s character takes on the role of Franz, the lover. As though empowered by their names, Tonia and Franz get more intimate as the camera moves away, not to cut away from this sexual moment, but instead moving towards a large mirror in the bedroom that shows Tonia and Franz having sex. For so long, “the mirror shot” of trans bodies in film has been about a trans person filmed looking at themselves, being self-critical of their reflection, dissecting their flaws in feeling born in the wrong body, unable to see on the outside what they feel they are. It is a trope and one rarely filmed with grace, always so static, othered for what it is not, literally framing trans identity at the most surface level. But the mirror shot in this scene of So Pretty is framed to show trans and queer sexuality that is captivating and sensual, yet neither leering nor intrusive. There is a simplicity and elegance to this moment that continues throughout the film, which shows these characters in lust, anxiety, and heartbreak. It is what makes it a special film.
With So Pretty, Rovinelli’s trans aesthetics push towards a way of looking at what trans people want out of their desires that is neither tied to nor compared with normative society. It is a film that feels like a respite and release from the status quo that transcends the dialogues and conversations that so often box in other contemporary trans films. Instead of being dogged by the question of visibility or assimilation within the mainstream film framework, Rovinelli honors her queer forefathers and foremothers by wanting to share what speaks to her and translate that into powerful words and images as though unearthing new ground. That accomplishment should make So Pretty a foundational work in any subsequent trans films that come after it.