52 Tues­days

There’s nifty bait-and-switch sto­ry­telling at play in debut direc­tor Sophie Hyde’s Boy­hood-style, time-lapse dra­ma. What seems to be a queer issue film morphs into a rich the­mat­ic brew depict­ing how fam­i­ly, sex­u­al­i­ty and time are all bound up in defin­ing one another.

52 Tues­days was filmed for one day a week over the course of a year and then con­densed into a 110 minute film. The nar­ra­tive pro­gress­es only on Tues­days as this is the des­ig­nat­ed evening that pep­py 16-year-old Bil­lie (Til­da Cob­ham-Her­vey) spends with her moth­er, Jane (Del Her­bert-Jane). The two have stopped liv­ing togeth­er to give Jane the space to adjust to the process of gen­der reassignment.

Now liv­ing with her less strict father, Bil­lie takes the oppor­tu­ni­ty to run wild. A stand-out scene shows her spy­ing on a cou­ple fuck­ing in the school cloak­room. When they ask her to join in, Cobham-Hervey’s ingénue eyes are wide, hyp­no­tised at the cross­roads between inno­cence and expe­ri­ence. Her exag­ger­at­ed man­ner­isms dis­tract from her char­ac­ter but the cam­era still loves her doe-eyed form.

Hyde’s open­ing tac­tic of har­ness­ing the voyeuris­tic thrill of Jane’s phys­i­cal trans­for­ma­tion cedes ground to clas­si­cal grow­ing pains ter­ri­to­ry. On the ear­ly Tues­days, the bounc­ing Bil­lie func­tions as a nar­ra­tor who rings in the changes. As the par­ent-child rela­tion­ship become more dis­tant, Hyde shows her full hand. Trans­gen­derism is the top­i­cal MacGuf­fin for a film about chil­dren grow­ing away from par­ents, even as mir­ror­ing behav­iour per­sists. Shift­ing inde­pen­dent val­ues and the strain this puts on what was once a har­mo­nious par­ent-child rela­tion­ship is compelling.

The clum­sy device of stream­ing glob­al news footage between each Tues­day ham­mers home the point that change is con­stant and the world won’t stop. In real life, Her­bert-Jane is non gen­der-con­form­ing and anchors the film with gravitas.