52 Tuesdays

Dir: Sophie Hyde

2014

****

Sophie Hyde’s fascinating drama 52 Tuesdays is a slow-burner and I have to say I didn’t warm to it all at first, however, there is a good reason for that and it is the same reason why I think the film is such a triumph of independent film and creative writing. Our story begins in suburban Australia. 16-year-old Billie lives with her lesbian mother Jane and her uncle Harry. Her father Tom is divorced from her mother, following the realisation that she was a lesbian. Her uncle Harry is more like a brother to her and you could say her childhood has been unconventional but decisions are made as a family and everyone is always open with one another, with Tom still very much part of the family. One day Jane reveals plans to undergo a gender transition, now calling himself James. She has put off telling Billie until the last minute as she is worried about how she would take it. Tom and Harry are clearly irritated by the way she has decided to tell Billie and that it has taken her so long to make the decision – one that they’ve seen coming for a while. James decides he wants Billie to live with Tom for a year, with which Tom has agreed, as she doesn’t know how she will be reacting to the hormone treatment and needs time and space alone. Billie accepts her mother’s transition with no issue but she doesn’t like the fact she is being kicked out of the house. She forces James to give her a time limit, to which James responds ‘a year’. A decision is made then to have regular weekly visits restricting the time Billy is together with Jane/James to Tuesdays from 16:00 - 22:00, starting on the 23rd of August. The film is then divided into the corresponding 52 segments, each covering one Tuesday, and starting with a title card showing the date with a world event that also happened on that date. At first the meetings a stifled as the two simply have dinner together and watch a bit of television. After catching two older students, Josh and Jasmine, being intimate with one another in a school store room, Billie ends up befriending them and meeting them regularly. The three students begin to experiment with each other on a sexual level but they can only meet on Tuesdays as they only have access to the store room on that day. When the students loose access to the room, Billie hatches a plan and pretends to her father that she is now going to spend longer at James’s house on Tuesdays and will now be home at 12.00. She asks Harry to cover for her as well as lending her access to an apartment he has keys for. Billie then films the sexual experiments of the threesome, as well as interviewing them. After a few months James suffers a setback and is told that he has to stop testosterone injections because of a rare condition of his body not tolerating it. Billie becomes more distant and more interested in her friends as James becomes more and more low. Tom finds out about Billie’s lies and Jasmine also get tired of Billie’s films. She feels that it is all about Billie’s film and doesn’t want to be part of her experiments anymore. After sending a nude photograph of herself to Jasmine, Billie gets into trouble as this is considered child pornography. The school principal, James, Tom and Jasmine strongly disapprove it. Billie is shocked that James destroys one of her tapes, and refuses further contact with him. Josh does not want physical contact with Billie anymore because of Tom's disapproval. Later Billie is willing to destroy a remaining tape, but since it is in James' house who she no longer visits, she is dependent on Harry, who finally destroys it for her. When her father is involved in a motorcycle crash everyone is forced to reassess what is important. When the year is finished, Billie reconciles with James and arrives home, moving in at precisely the same time she left one year before. Billie, Josh and Jasmine soon become friends again. The initial problem I had with the film was the disjointed narration. The beginning of the film is constantly interrupted with footage Billie has taken of herself talking nonsense into the camera – clearly retrospectively from the future. Most of the footage is of her pausing for excruciating lengths of time. It really only became obvious that this was about a young girl’s look at sexuality and adult relationships at about a third of the way in. I wondered why we didn’t see more of James’s transition – which I thought was the point of the film. However, the more I learned about the film, the more I understood it. The film has rules. The Six Rules of Making '52 Tuesdays' were as follows: (1) The film will be shot once a week, every Tuesday (and only on Tuesdays), over a full year (or 52 Tuesdays) ; (2) The film will be shot chronologically; what is shot on a specific Tuesday is what happens on that Tuesday (i.e. no re-shoots!) ; (3) Something from each of the fifty-two Tuesdays has to be shown ; (4) It will be a scripted drama but will allow the script to be heavily influenced during the year, with the writing continuing until the final Tuesday ; (5) A non-professional cast will be used who can be different but connected to their characters and will influence their story ; and (6) Rather than artificially creating change, allow the subtle but genuine changes over the course of the year to challenge our own expectations of time and change and influence the story we tell. That must have been a huge undertaking, one that really took effort and discipline. After halfway through the film the changes start to become obvious, not just in James but in every one of the characters. It’s quite remarkable. Screenwriter Matthew Cormack said: "It seemed to me how we made the film, confining our narrative and shoot time to fifty-two consecutive Tuesdays, could inform the very ideas of what the characters were grappling with, especially around the pursuit of authenticity and the promise of change. Ultimately, however, as a writer, it was not about relinquishing control to some kind of chance and circumstance but about the opportunity to embrace the chaos of the unknown in a way that would hopefully show me (and consequently an audience) something about the challenge of constructing a life, a story, an identity, a gender, a sexuality, only with the materials we're given in our short, limited lives." For me, this is brilliant film making – I want to say guerrilla film making but that isn’t what it is, it’s something far more profound. None of the cast were professional actors but I think after this film they are probably more qualified than most. Of growing up on screen, lead actress Tilda Cobham-Hervey said: "When I began working on '52 Tuesdays' I was 16, I had never had a boyfriend...Over the course of this project I became an adult, I fell in love, completed high school, talked about things I had never even let myself think about, I learnt what sad was and angry was and I escaped a bubble and learnt about the incredible wonder and tragedy of the real world. I learnt what the words 'real' and 'true' meant, which are far more wonderful than any other word in existence. One of the questions that was often discussed during this process was "are you living an authentic life?" A loaded question that was my basis for taking control of my own person and actually deciding how to get on with this thing called 'growing up'." The wonderful thing about this – and with all the other characters – is that you can see it on screen. The start of the film only makes sense when you reach the end, so while the film really needs perseverance, the rewards are fruitful. My only niggles is that I wanted to learn more about the transition process.