Inabel Selah | The Tailor / 2021

sewing up a new identity

by Douglas Messerli

 

Inabal Selah The Tailor / 2021[14 minutes]

 

We might guess where Israeli director/writer Inabal’s Selah’s short film of 2021 is going from the very first moment. Oren (Koren Solomon) a hirsute tailor is making a dress for one of his gay, transgender clients, all pink and chiffon, whom as a “top” he fucks.

    The would-be clothes designer has also applied to design school, and in the very first few frames of the film is sent a letter that rejects his application, to his devastation and his mother’s (Yael Daniel) sad regret. Mother and son in this movie obviously have a loving a relationship, but how far that rapport will take the now angry and confused dress designer is not quite established.

     Oren shaves his beard, and is interested in going even further, but the intrusion of his mother stops him from applying the makeup that he has discovered in their shared bathroom. Instead, Oren tears down all of his old designs from the wall, and begins to create a new wardrobe for his dummy model that consists of a gown all in white, almost like a marriage gown.

     That costume, we quickly perceives is for himself as, in the middle of the night, he finally is able to the makeup to his face, place the hidden wig upon his head, and dress himself in the gown which he has been sewing up for so very many nights.

     To her mother’s blinky-eyed middle-of-the-night awakening, he presents his newly discovered self, the transgender individual he has been hiding from himself and others for all of his life.

     We don’t even get a glimpse of his new transformation, but we surely guess it might be something splendid. If nothing else, it is the identity that he has been secretly sewing up for years of his closeted tailoring activities. A rejection of his dreams has freed him to become an individual he has for so-long struggled to become.

     There is nothing particularly earth-shattering here, or even amazingly revelatory. But in this short film we have witnessed another being come into her identity, and move into the new recognition of self. What is mother has to say about this is not really important for her grown son, now daughter. But it might, nonetheless, been interesting to see her reaction and the reality Oren had consequently entered.

 

Los Angeles, December 29, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (December 2024).