Tiresia (2003) - film review

One evening, Terranova, a solitary young man, drives to the Bois de Boulogne, where he selects the most attractive prostitute he can find, a young Brazilian called Tiresia.  He takes her back to his dingy apartment where he announces that he intends to keep her forever, as an object to be gazed upon in admiration.  To Terranova’s surprise, over the next few days Tiresia’s voice deepens and she starts to acquire facial hair.  She tells her captor that she is a transsexual and is on a course of hormone treatment before her final operation.  Terranova’s reaction is to stab his prisoner in the eyes and dump her unconscious body in a forest on the outskirts of a remote village.  The next day, a dumb teenage girl, Anna, discovers the body and has Tiresia taken back to her home, where she lives alone with her father.  Unable to go to the police because he is an illegal immigrant, Tiresia accepts Anna’s kindnesses and stays as a welcome guest in her home.  Blinded and robbed of his feminine beauty, Tiresia accepts his lot and acquires a reputation as a soothsayer amongst the local community.  This troubles the local priest, Father François, who sees in Tiresia a threat to his authority.

This third film from controversial art-house director Bertrand Bonello is as intriguing and artistically rich as it is frustrating and impenetrable.  With a pacing that would be tediously slow moving in a conventional film, Tiresia succeeds in holding our attention and drawing us into the dark inner world of its protagonists, largely on the strength of Josée Deshaies’ poetically sombre (almost Bresson-like) camera work and the tortured performances from its three lead actors.  Unusually, the lead character is played by two actors, one female (Clara Choveaux), the other male (Thiago Telès).  Perhaps more bewilderingly, Laurent Lucas plays the part of two different characters (Terranova and Père François), inviting the spectator to draw some improbable conclusions about what this unfathomable morality tale actually means.

The film, which is based on a Greek myth, tackles themes of a spiritual, sexual and religious nature with an almost surreal profundity and originality, although much of this is marred by Bonello’s awkward style, which all too often comes across as slightly pretentious and self-consciously arty (the bombastic opening sequence being a case in point).  The shocking brutality of the scenes in which Tiresia is mutilated and dumped is calculated to arouse controversy and will doubtless put off many spectators, but others are more like to be alienated by the film’s grim asceticism and its baffling ambiguity.

© James Travers 2006

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