AFI FEST Film Festival 2022 | Monica

I had the pleasure of catching Monica (directed by Andrea Pallaoro who also co-wrote it with Orlando Tirado) at the AFI Fest Film Festival. This film premiered in Venice, where it won the ARCA CinemaGiovani Award for Best Italian Film. This win interested me, not because this film doesn’t deserve wins, but because I’m always interested in how a film gets classified as being from a country, as everyone does it differently. This film has an Italian director/co-writer (Andrea Pallaoro) and financing from Italy, but the story is set in the US, and the cast all play Americans.

Monica is a film about family, abandonment, and acceptance. It’s also a film that centers a Trans-woman character and her experience. Monica (played by Trace Lysette) has been on her own since her mother dropped her off at the bus station as a teenager with only 5 minutes to spare and the message, “I can’t be your mother anymore.” We don’t follow Monica during those early teen years, and that time is only hinted at. We meet her as an adult, but one that still carries that wound of early abandonment that we get the first taste of very early in the film when she calls Jimmy. Jimmy is a man we never see who we only know through her attempts to contact him, but we see and hear the need to try and keep him in her life, to not be left behind by him. Then Monica receives a call she never thought she’d receive, not from Jimmy, but from the sister-in-law she never met, asking her to come back home to help care for her mother, Eugenia (played by Patricia Clarkson), who is losing her memory along with her health.

The film never denies how difficult it is for Monica to return to the scene of her trauma but also doesn’t deny her the joy of forging new relationships with her niece and nephews. It also doesn’t give an easy resolution to her relationship with her mother, whom she now has to mother, who denied her mothering when she still needed it. Her mother doesn’t recognize her right away like she secretly hoped. Though that may have been the only way for them to find a healing place, because Eugenia is not the same woman anymore that abandoned her, and that might be a way that helps Monica heal a bit from the pain of abandonment and finally call out Jimmy. And in the end, Eugenia does accept Monica as family, whether she finally recognized Monica as her daughter is not fully answered, but I think she did, even if it’s not voiced.

The film does a good job of balancing the moments of joy with moments of sadness. From the topic, you might not expect there would be laughs, but there were plenty during certain scenes in the film (particularly at one move during a solo dance scene). There were also moments that just made me smile while watching.

The film ends with a scene of Monica’s nephew signing the US National anthem at school graduation. I talked to some people afterward, and they thought it was a weird place to end the film, but I think it was perfect. This was a moment of pure family and acceptance. The opposite of abandonment. It was a moment of healing and catharsis.

During the Q&A Trace spoke about a hope that Monica will someday be viewed simply as a family drama, and not a trans-drama. I hope she gets her wish because that will mean the industry will have taken a seismic shift.

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