La Travestie (Blu-ray Review)
Director
Yves BoissetRelease Date(s)
1988 (July 21, 2026)Studio(s)
Sara Films (Indicator/Powerhouse Films)- Film/Program Grade: B
- Video Grade: A
- Audio Grade: A
- Extras Grade: B
Review
A bizarre odyssey of a film, La Travestie (“The Cross-Dresser,” 1988) was a spectacular flop in its native France, a box-office bomb and critical failure, the beginning of the end for director Yves Boisset, who soon after retreated to French television. Seen today, the picture is not without its faults but is also impressively bold, unusual, and frank.
Nicole Armingaud (Zabou Breitman, billed here as simply “Zabou”) is an emotionally frustrated attorney in provincial France, her law partner stringing her along with empty promises and stealing away her best briefs. She has an abortion while, contradictorily, tells her three (older and married) boyfriends that she’s pregnant, extracting money from them, while also stealing money from her boss’s safe, and abruptly disappears to Paris where, seemingly on a whim, she assumes the identity of a man.
As “Nick,” she picks up prostitute Myriam (Anna Galiena), but once in the hotel room confesses her biological gender and the two becomes friends and, soon after, lovers, with Nick effectively becomes her pimp, helping Myriam earn more money but also occasionally beating her, partly to curb her heavy drinking. Nevertheless, they seem happy until Myriam (real name: Solange) is brutally murdered while visiting her ailing mother.
A despondent Nicole, now calling herself Solange, next becomes a rather docile domestic servant for Anne-Marie (Valérie Steffen), her husband and their children, but after finding explicit photos of Anne-Marie’s husband having sex with another woman, Nicole and Anne-Marie themselves embark upon an affair (with Nicole sometimes as “Nick”), the pair fleeing to the seaside home of Anne-Marie’s older sister, Christine (Christine Pascal). Later still, Nicole becomes obsessively involved with ruggedly handsome if middle-aged teacher Alain (Yves Afonso), who thinks Nicole/Solange/Nick is actually Christine.
One obvious complaint about La Travestie is that Zabou is completely unconvincing as a man yet no one bats an eye at her new identity, everyone apparently completely and thoroughly convinced by Nicole’s gender-swap. However, under the movie’s own terms, Nick’s believability is rather beside the point, and anyway Nicole is not a transvestite in the usual sense, nor in the usual sense is she bisexual or lesbian. Instead, the story, from Alain Roger’s supposedly fact-based novel, explores this mentally ill character’s search for identity and purpose, in a world where—from her perspective—her clingy devotion to various lovers goes unrewarded, especially from her male lovers, all of whom soon become anxious to get rid of her, sometimes with good reason. She floats freely between male and female identities but, for Nicole/Nick, neither is particularly affirming.
Zabou is rather good in terms of conveying ambiguity about Nicole’s mental state; outwardly, she seems ambivalent toward others only to abruptly turn a dark corner into neediness and, sometimes, violence. Dispassionately she prostitutes herself (using Myriam’s wig and wardrobe) seemingly for no other reason than to earn money when she’s broke, but perhaps also to “become” her former lover, at least for a little while. She uses and manipulates people, but never maliciously; it all seems to be about a search for self. None of the various personalities, male and female, she adopts always become dead ends, and when the dead ends begin to add up, the more unstable she becomes.
Presented in 1.85:1 widescreen and color, Powerhouse Films/Indicator’s Blu-ray world premiere of La Travestie, Region “A” and “B” releases (their release dates separated by a single day) looks good, drawn as it was from a 4K scan of the original camera negative. The color, sharpness, blacks and contrast are in line with late-1980s cinematographic standards. The LPCM 1.0 mono is also fine, and the optional English subtitles are good.
Extra features on this limited edition (4,000 copies for the U.K. and U.S.) consist of: Girls and Boys Come Out to Play, a new, 14-minute video essay by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas; a 4-minute extract from the French television show Midi 3 Auvergne, featuring the cast and crew on location; and an image gallery. Somewhat bizarrely, also included is the complete dialogue and continuity script, but it’s entirely in French with no English translation.
Once again, The Digital Bits was sent only a check disc instead of final product, so we have no way of assessing the 32-page booklet reportedly included.
Though not quite an unheralded masterpiece, La Travestie is an intriguing, certainly unpredictable film, commendable in its frankness about mental illness and gender issues.
- Stuart Galbraith IV