Liam English | Posture / 2018

christmas birth

by Douglas Messerli

 

Liam English (screenwriter and director) Posture / 2018 [23 minutes]

 

This most definitely amateur film, not even listed in IMDb, is nonetheless a rather believable story of a young man Noah, who spotting a misplaced female shift in the Men’s section of a local mall, suddenly realizes it is time to become the woman he has always felt himself to be.

     In a long scene in which the former Noah transforms himself, shaving his face, chest, and legs, applying makeup which he has hidden his bathroom drawer, and, finally, putting on a quite horrible wig he has also been hiding, until he becomes his chosen embodiment of his self-realization: Ophelia (Liam English). She calls her girlfriend Stephanie (Grace Poniatowski) to reveal the truth in return for her support as a female friend.

   But in the meantime, her father (Dave Van Dusen) catches on the staircase leaving the house, and the two face off, Ophelia desperately attempting to explain that she has always been a girl and begging her parent to call her by her given name. He reacts the way so many faced with this situation probably do, at least at first, imagining the it first as a “costume,” perhaps a school project, a trick, a game.

    When all of those options are denied by Ophelia, the father takes the next more convenient alternative, that his son Noah must be gay. But when yet again his new daughter insists upon a gender difference not merely a sexual one, he cannot comprehend and insists that Noah simply needs help, help that he is unable to provide.

     His final solution, and it is a bit like a murder of his offspring, a sacrifice of his first born to the god of conventionality, he orders Ophelia to get out of the house.

     At his girlfriend’s house, now in full sunlight—evidently a continuity flaw in this seemingly home-shot movie—Noah’s former girlfriend goes similarly through the same process of thought, denying Ophelia not only her support but her comprehension and empathy. Stephanie doesn’t even believe, so she insists, in the “that transsexual…I don’t believe it’s real.” In short, she denies Ophelia even her reality. Stephanie even suggests that she let her know “if things go back to normal,” adding abnormality to Ophelia’s nonexistence.

     “This is what’s normal. Finally…this is who I am,” the brave new woman explains.

     Yet those simple words are incomprehensible to the people upon whom she most counts to help her in her transition. She also demands he leave the house and leave her alone.

      Ophelia retreats to an iron bench in the cold winter air. A mother and her very young daughter (Hannah and Lyric Caramto) pass by, the child asking “Why is that lady crying?” For the first time someone has identified her recognizing her own gender, and Ophelia looks up with a flash of hope. The mother, recognizing what she perceives as an imitation, quickly pulls her daughter away. But those words finally make this tearful Ophelia vaguely smile.

     This film’s title, of course, commonly is used to explain an attitude or stance, a way of thinking or of positioning one’s body. But as a verb it can also mean to “strike an attitude, to put on airs or behave affectedly. Yet in it’s archaic meaning it can mean a particular attitude or pose. And in all cases it is related to the word “imposter,” rooted in the concept of putting on or placing upon oneself an attitude or pose. In other words, a fraudulent position or stance.

       Yet the child immediately cuts through all social conventions and recognizing Ophelia for what she truly looks like and therefore, logically speaking, is: a lady.

       Surely the bad acting, costuming, camera work, and lighting of this short work will put off most viewers. But the script nonetheless may be one of the most honest expressions of what it must be like to finally “come out” as a transgender individual, an act that often quickly alienates the individual from all those she or he most loves and needs in order to survive.

 

Los Angeles, August 22, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (August 2025).