Ma Vie En Rose through the lens of Schiavi and Irigaray

One scene in director Alain Berliner's "Ma Vie En Rose" that really stuck with me after the viewing was the scene in which Ludovic disassociates from himself following the mock wedding he puts on with the neighbor boy. In the face of his mother's ire and the neighbor's fainting, Ludovic adapts a trick his grandmother taught him and closes his eyes, imaging the world is as he wishes it to be. This finds him flying, away from the troubles and up and out into the air... where he looks down and sees himself, being hauled across the lawn by his angry mother. He is promptly thrust back into his own body.

What is the significance of this scene?

For me, this image in "Ma Vie En Rose" was very powerful. We are witness to a division of self, a multiplicity of identity: Ludo's "idealized" self gazing down at the self, the identity, generated by his parents and the rest of the neighborhood. This "Ludo as spectator" looking down on "Ludo as spectacle" highlights the way in which Ludo is, as Michael Schiavi writes, "the object of perpetual observation" (9). It also begins the period described by Pollack in the Schiavi text in which "boys become extremely watchful, carefully monitoring how other boys act" (10). Ludo does this, watching his brothers closely and trying for a brief period to mimic them (even practicing in the mirror, what Schiavi calls a "Lacanian sketch") but when it fails, he quickly rejects this period which Pollack describes as so crucial. Because Ludo has no desire to be a boy: this crucial boy stage for him is nothing more than a phase.

What is the significance of this in light of Irigaray's "The Sex Which Is Not One?"

"'She' is indefinitely other in herself," writes Irigaray, describing the plight of the woman, a plight which Ludo is familiar with. Irigaray writes of women's use of language being not exactly what they mean, of discourse as disconnected from their true selves as a function of a gender role premised on an inherently flawed sexual role. Ludo's frustration with this phenomenon he cannot explain is evident in his neologism: after a biology discussion with his sister, he coins the term "girlboy" to describe himself. Yet even this term is a case in which the woman "steps ever so slightly aside from herself with a murmur, an exclamation, a whisper, a sentence left unfinished" (29). Ludo cannot just express his gender identity without addressing a role already assigned to him, one he is powerless to negate (Even in my post, lade with masculine pronouns) and therefore must account for in his linguistic attempts to establish a gender identity.