Lewis Martin Soucy | The Blue Dress / 2013

the outsider

by Douglas Messerli

 

Philip Hurd-Wood (original story) and Lewis Martin Soucy (screenplay), Lewis Martin Soucy (director) The Blue Dress / 2013 [10 minutes]

 

You might almost describe the short film by French Quebecois director Lewis Martin Soucy of the French and Spanish supported film The Blue Dress as a kind of mystery.

    The film begins with an absolutely ordinary event. A grocery cashier, Rita (Loles León) observing a truly loving relationship between a mother (Laura More) and her young son (André Boserman) as they check out at her stand.

     Simply observing their love and rapport almost hypnotizes her as she sits almost in a stupor for some time after she has checked them out, her boss having to intrude to bring her back to her senses.

     Suddenly, in her time off, Rita goes on a shopping tour, taking a train into the inner city, and pausing at a window of a shop whose name, quite clearly, she has written down, just to peer in. But the drag figure who runs the shop (Sunflower Fregoli Onnagata), who looks out fiercely at the seeming intruder, scares her off.

    Rita retreats to a nearby pub, drinking a pint simply to fortify her courage. She finally does enter the shop, much to the disdain of the clothes shops regular customers, particularly to twins (Los Jeme Los), dressed in boas, who fondle a blue dress she has just spotted before rejecting it. Another transvestite also picks up the dress to consider buying it, but finally, knowing that it might be perfect for her, the heavy-set cashier moves forward, quickly scooping it up. She holds it up in front of a mirror, checking it against her own body, but it is immediately clear that this overweight straight woman will simply be unable to fit into this dress, the other customers and the always disdainful owner openly mocking her for her delusion.

   Suddenly, the shop door opens and in steps a beautiful young man (Javier Lerma), who seeing the elderly cashier contemplating the dress in the mirror, immediately leaves the establishment. Rita, realizing perhaps her delusion, leaves immediately after.

      Yet suddenly everything in this so-far rather absurd little comedy shifts the next morning, when we see her at breakfast, across from her the boy she has encountered at the store. We now recognize that he is her son, and the dress she has been eyeing was not for herself, but a gift for her transgender son.

      The son tosses a bag with the dress within upon the table, but taking offense, Rita throws it back to him. Yet he takes it out, smells it as if it were a potent drug, making it clear that it is the perfect gift for him. Both smile in recognition of their own sort of love.

       The light, tinkly music by composer Dmitry Senko keeps this surprising delight moving along, so that we know from the beginning that despite the mother’s clear outsiderness, it is a world of love which she is proffering.

       The mystery being solved, ends also in love, even if it is not the resplendent vision of heterosexual love she has witnessed in her first encounter with mother and son. She has been challenged in a way the other mother will perhaps never be. Yet Rita has made clear he love and commitment to him.

 

Los Angeles, August 30, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (August 2026).