Seahorse review – moving study of the man who gave birth | Movie

AAcross the spectrum of fiction, the concept of male pregnancy has always been used for laughter, terror or, most often, for the combination of both. The theatrical poster of the vehicle Arnold Schwarzenegger Junior says a thousand words: Dr. Danny DeVito looks through the fourth wall with athis-The guy smiles while Schwarzenegger looks at us, stunned, as if to ask him how he could have been in such a situation. Even if these jokes finally make men's fragility, which suggests that an important stage of femininity would be men's worst nightmare, they are still jokes.

The new Seahorse documentary (which was produced in collaboration with The Guardian) dares to take seriously a scenario described up to now as absurd. Back in our fantasy world, nothing really amused about the heartfelt and tiring struggle of transsexual man Freddy McConnell to conceive and deliver his own baby. Director Jeanie Finlay expresses a sincere empathy for someone who will not let the genre come into conflict with the fundamental human impulse to create and nurture a new life. This is how Finlay wants us to see McConnell's path to fatherhood – a phenomenon as natural as the reproduction of the hippocampus, in which male specimens carry and breed their own young.

McConnell's daily friction stems from the disparity between his desire for biologically wired multiplication and the extraordinary medical measures that must be taken to make this dream come true. He underwent surgical procedures above the waist but not below, which allowed him to undergo an intense procedure of delivery in the water, captured frankly not far from Window Water Baby Moving. . Before that, however, he will have to stop the testosterone treatments that have brought him closer to the need to reconcile his body with his identity. At the end of the film, McConnell scolds for his naivety at the beginning of this trip, not realizing that listening to his internal clock would eventually lead him to "feel like a fucking alien".

The question of what is or is not "normal" weighs on almost every scene, the heaviest of those showing McConnell explaining himself in front of his family and loved ones. He finds it hard to understand that what may be unusual is not necessarily abnormal, which is compounded by the fact that many people simply do not want to hear it. A controversial conversation with a conservative member of the family crystallizes an inner pain that filmmakers and cisgender actors can only approach. For Finlay, however, allowing McConnell to use his own words gives meaning to a complicated process fraught with contradictions and paradoxes, even for those who do not fight against a total destabilization of their personality.

"It's a film about my delivery, but what I'm feeling is that I do not have a baby or pregnancy," says McConnell. "It's a kind of much more fundamental total loss of myself. I just want to close my eyes and be on the other side of the problem. While feeling a pinch of regret and crossing it is a vital part of anyone's pregnancy, the unique opposition that McConnell faces increases that anxiety. Even when in doubt, he does not need to constantly change the official pen forms to read "all pregnant people" instead of "all pregnant women".

Whatever doubts McConnell may have had, they collapse as soon as he is able to hold his child for the first time. The new parents describe this moment with a reverence close to the religious, an instantaneous bond of souls absent from any other component of the human experience. It is only then that one understands that McConnell exercises his right as a carbon-based organism by creating this link. Finlay organizes a moving juxtaposition of his own footage with personal McConnell's childhood videos, illustrating how he fits into a tradition that has been repeating itself ever since the dawn of time.

As Donald Trump continues to attack the protections of trans people, Finlay and McConnell jointly reestablish their overriding importance. McConnell is entitled to the full sum of what life has to offer, even if it is expensive or overwhelming, simply because life offers it. Finlay includes several passages in which McConnell does nothing special – take a bath, have lunch, stress – to situate her pregnancy in the everyday and the familiar. She tries to show how McConnell is both a person and unlike most people, the main challenge of the trans arts which also aims to address a non-trans audience. She does not always know which side of the fracture to attack, but she recognizes that it is there, which is more than most can not say. We all share universals like hurt and hope, it's just that their expression is different for McConnell. As the act of childbirth itself, something that has happened billions of times and yet still feels intimately personal, is one of ours.