The Regretters, geregisseerd door Marcus Lindeen Zweden, 2010, 58 min.
The Regretters (originele Zweedse
titel: Ångrarna) is een Zweedse documentairefilm onder regie van Marcus
Lindeen. Een ingekorte versie van de film werd uitgezonden als
zomeraflevering van Uitgesproken VARA.
Orlando en Mikael, twee mannen van in
de 60, delen een pijnlijk geheim: jaren geleden gingen ze onder het mes
om als vrouw door het leven te gaan maar nu willen ze terug gewoon man
zijn. Tijdens een intieme en confronterende tête à tête vertellen de
twee mannen voluit over hun mentale en fysieke littekens en hun
verlangen om opnieuw heel te zijn. De documentaire 'Ångrarna' biedt een
zeldzame en doortastende blik op een moeilijk bespreekbaar onderwerp. Een van de twee heeft ondertussen
middels een tweede operatie zijn originele geslacht weer terug. De
ander worstelt nog met zijn beslissing.
Regretters is a about two men, Mikael
and Orlando, who both made one of the most dramatic, life altering, and
final decisions conceivable–to undergo sexual reassignment surgery–and
then changed their minds. With a run time of sixty minutes and
a format of a single stage setting (with some newsreel and home movies
spliced in), Regretters has more than enough squirm inducing moments.
It challenges a viewer’s traditional, preconceived notions of sex and
gender and then challenges any politically correct positions on the
other side. One reason it is able to do that is
because its two participants are not typical transsexuals. Orlando, who
underwent one of the first sex change operations in Sweden (in 1967)
was simply gay at a time in which society would not accept him in that
way. After living for many years (and even being married for 11 years)
as a woman, he underwent reconstructive surgery to return to living as
a man. Mikael, who reports having known others who felt trapped in the
wrong body reports never having felt that way. Deeply, painfully, shy,
he appears to have undertaken the surgery out of a mixture of
curiosity, desperation, and a futile attempt to become the woman he
could never get to fall in love with his male self. He reports
“immediately” regretting the decision, speaks bitterly about the
surgeons not asking him “are you sure?” before performing the
operation, and was awaiting reconstructive surgery at the time of
filming. It’s a platitude that good (i.e.
interesting) cases make bad law. Perhaps the documentary corollary is
that exceptional people make interesting stories but ones which are
hard to derive applications from. A more conservative viewer could
certainly pounce on Mikael’s story to reinforce the notion that a
society too eager to accommodate life altering decisions in a
non-judgmental fashion can end up complicit in the damage perpetrated
by confused or uncertain people. Conversely, a liberal viewer could
crow over the implicit lesson in Orlando’s story: that intolerance of
his gay lifestyle led him not to conform to a more socially
conventional sex role but to seek an even more definitive way to
express who he was and seek a life that in some way approximated his
wishes.
