The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, October 12-18
The Crying Game (1993)
Directed by Neil Jordan
In our current more sexually progressive age, The Crying Game inevitably seems just a tad outmoded now in its view of a transgender female through a cisgender male perspective. And yet, though it doesn’t always escape a time-capsule feel in its sexual politics—with the scene of Fergus (Stephen Rea) cutting Dil’s (Jaye Davidson) hair to make her look more like her original birth gender, however necessary plot-wise, especially troubling in its normalizing implications—Jordan’s film still packs an emotional wallop. Beyond its British and Irish settings and its Troubles-related political context, the film occasionally exudes the shadings of a classic film noir, with Fergus occasionally adopting the cynical wisecracking demeanor of a standard noir antihero, and Jude (Miranda Richardson) playing a cold-hearted femme fatale type. Ultimately, though, The Crying Game scintillates as a study of masculinity softened and altogether subverted by feminine sensitivity, a thematic arc reflected not only in British hostage Jody’s (Forest Whitaker) faintly effeminate manner and Dil’s voluptuous transsexuality, but in Jordan’s wholehearted embrace of direct, operatic emotion in telling this tale. The Crying Game remains one of cinema’s most touching romances, regardless of the characters’ shifting gender identities. Kenji Fujishima (October 16, 6pm at the Metrograph’s “Queer 90s”)