Monica (Andrea Pallaoro, 2022) (Patreon)

There's a remarkable awkwardness running through Monica, the third feature film by Andrea Pallaoro. It's the sort of awkwardness more typical of debut films, when a director is still learning how to modulate tone, as well as just how much pressure they can apply to the narrative's subtext before it becomes distractingly blatant. This somewhat unstable atmosphere is strongest in the film's beginning, and for the most part it gradually dissipates. I can't say for sure how deliberate this was on Pallaoro's part, but the movement is felicitous. We come to feel more "at home" in the film as we stick with it, and this pretty directly mirrors the interior journey of the title character.

Monica (Trace Lysette) is a trans woman living in California. (We only know that's where she lives because of her license plate. It's that withholding of a film.) We know very little about her life, but we see it interrupted by an unexpected call from her sister-in-law Laura (Emily Browning), who has tracked her down. Monica's mother Genie (Patricia Clarkson) is dying of a brain tumor, but they haven't seen each other since Genie dropped her child at the bus station and, we can infer, told her to never come back.

As numerous critics have pointed out, Pallaoro's direction and the cramped cinematography by Katelin Ariznmendi do a lot of heavy lifting in Monica, since most of the characters' interactions are defined by what they are unable to say. Many key sequences, especially those involving Monica's physical presence, are hidden within deep shadow, with only the thinnest strands of light allowing the actors to appear at all. The estimable Ela Bittencourt wrote in the Viennale catalogue that these images "beautifully enhance the film's atmosphere of secretiveness and trepidation," and I certainly can't argue otherwise.

As Monica, Lysette is disarmingly interiorized, and at first I wasn't sure how to evaluate her handling of the role. In early scenes on the road, or when she's at a bar waiting for a meet-up who never shows, I detected a double-coding to her words and gestures, an approach that was neither naturalistic or mannered. Was this "bad acting"? But Lysette's performance evolves over the course of the film, becoming more open, as her character becomes more secure, less guarded. And I think this is telling us something about separation from and reintegration into the family structure.

Her mother having abandoned her, Monica was forced to strike out on her own and figure out who she was. But there's a big difference between a solo performance -- working in the mirror, as it were -- and developing your character in relation to others. Monica wasn't alone, exactly. We know next to nothing about her relationship with her boyfriend except that it's over. The film enters Monica's world in medias res and provides only glimpses of what her life is like. She's a masseuse and occasional cam girl. She loves New Wave music. She forgets to charge her phone.

But once she is able to interact with her family again -- and keep in mind, going back home to a disapproving Southern mother is a big risk -- Monica acts more naturally, displays a more complete comfort in her own skin. Nevertheless, Pallaoro's boldest creative choices are the ones about which I'm most ambivalent. The viewer too must grapple with the weight of the unsaid. We never know whether Genie recognizes her daughter. (But there is a brief scene of Clarkson that is a true master class, where we silently watch her face cycle through many emotions -- pain, comfort, rue, regret.

While the film's conclusion shows that Monica doesn't need to be recognized to reenter the family circle, this skirts a bit too close to "don't ask, don't tell." Monica, like all of us, has the right to be recognized for who she is. Then again, maybe she wants something altogether different. Her presence in the life of her nephew Brody (Graham Caldwell) means that however his gender identity develops, he'll have the support Monica never did.