God Help Me, I Actually Really Enjoyed 2014's Boy Meets Girl, a Trans Romance Written and Directed by Eric Schaeffer
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About a year ago I got an anonymous email from an actor who said that he had looked at a review of a film he was in and saw that I had not only panned it but also criticized his hairstyle and his voice.
This led the thespian to Google me so that he could see just who was writing witheringly of him and his work. He then wrote that I had a terrible, unlistenable, grating voice that made his ears bleed and that I had a lot of nerve criticizing anyone’s hair, since I was bald.
It went on like that for some time, with the mystery actor punching joyously below the belt as he lobbed insult after insult at me. I imagine that writing that email felt good in the moment but empty afterwards.
Now I have been a professional pop culture writer for twenty-six years. In that time I have written thousands upon thousands of reviews featuring a seemingly limitless number of actors, writers and directors.
Yet when I read that email I thought, almost instantly, “I bet Eric Schaeffer sent that.” Then I told my Facebook group about the mystery missive and they also guessed that the actor making fun of me for being bald and having, in his estimation, a less than sonorous voice was, indeed, Eric Schaeffer.
Schaeffer is a relatively obscure cultural figure known primarily for his co-writing, co-directing and co-starring debut My Life’s In Turnaround as well as a series of vanity films in which beautiful women throw themselves at Schaeffer’s characters in a frenzy of pure lust.
I have written extremely negatively about pretty much every thing the writer-director-actor has done and he has a reputation for taking reviews very personality and criticizing the critics.
I have no idea whether Schaeffer was the man behind the email but it seemed like a pretty good guess at the very least.
That said, I go out of my way to be fair so even though for years I would single out Eric Schaeffer as my least favorite filmmaker I am now ready to stand before God and the internet and declare that, much to my surprise, I liked an Eric Schaeffer movie.
That’s right: Eric Schaeffer wrote and directed a movie that I enjoyed and thought was legitimately good and sweet. It helps, of course, that while Schaeffer wrote and directed 2014’s Boy Meets Girl he did not star in it.
That honor instead went to Michelle Hendley, a trans woman Schaeffer discovered through Youtube videos documenting her transition.
Hendley plays Ricky, an aspiring fashion designer in a Conservative Kentucky small town. Ricky’s dad is loving and supportive but her mother was less understanding and took her own life, one of a number of melodramatic touches the film doesn’t really need.
Ricky works as a barista in a coffee shop where she meets cute with Francesca Duval (Alexandra Turshen) when Francesca attempts to order an excessively complicated, girly drink and the barista coffee-shames her for wanting anything beyond a cappuccino.
Francesca is a beautiful, bubbly blonde engaged to David (Michael Galante), a transphobic Marine obsessed with marrying a virgin. He refers to Francesca as his “Virgin angel” in their Skype calls but he has a sexual secret and soon so does she. In yet another melodramatic twist, they have the same secret but I am getting ahead of myself.
Even though Francesca has very publicly reserved her virginity for her jarhead fiancé she develops an instant crush on the sardonic coffee-slinger and it isn’t long until they’re making out. Francesca had never been with a woman before but in Boy Meets Girl sexuality and gender are fluid, even in small town Kentucky.
Francesca’s longtime best friend is Robby Riley (Michael Welch), a macho womanizer with an ingratiating drawl who loves and accepts Francesca for who she is even more than she is initially aware.
Boy Meets Girl cheats a little by having seemingly everyone who meets Ricky and Robby observes that he is clearly deeply in love with her. This is apparently clear to everybody they encounter even if they do not realize that she is trans.
Francesca thinks she has plenty of time to explore her sexuality while her future husband is safely away overseas in Afghanistan. So she is less than enthused to discover that some strings have been pulled by the wealthy and connected to get David out of Afghanistan and close to home.
Boy Meets Girl is rooted in a very empathetic exploration of the complicated psyche of a small town trans woman trying to navigate her way through the tricky world of love and sex but it occasionally goes too big and broad.
For example at the fancy rich people party where Francesca receives the bad news that her hate-filled future hubby is now stateside and ready to ruin her life Francesca quips that her dad is so deeply immersed in the Tear Party that he’d probably tea bag Bill O’Reilly. The oblivious Conservative observes that he doesn’t know exactly what she means by “tea-bagging” but that if it involves enjoying a nice cup of tea with O’Reilly then he has no problem with it.
David is cartoonish and over-the-top with his hatred of Francesca. He misgenders and insults her in all sorts of ugly ways yet it isn’t entirely surprising when it is revealed that in sophomore year of high school David and Ricky had sex, something that obviously filled him with shame as well as a desperate need to over-compensate through transphobia and a wildly excessive burlesque of brutish masculinity.
That means that both members of a heterosexual Christian couple that were ostensibly saving themselves for marriage have had sex with the same trans woman. I get that things are a little different in small towns but that nevertheless is one of the elements of the film that rings melodramatic rather than true.
Boy Meets Girl engages in a bit of misdirection in that it initially seems to be a love story between a trans woman with a tragic past and a rich, beautiful princess whose mind is opened by her relationship with Ricky.
Schaeffer’s surprisingly sweet and sensitive film is instead a variation on one of the most ubiquitous plots in romantic comedies: the protagonist not realizing that the person they’ve been searching for all their lives has been right by their side all along.
It’s Robby that Francesca is really in love with and, in the grand tradition of romantic comedies, he is in love with her.
Even David supports Ricky and her dreams of being a fashion designer in New York but if that doesn’t entirely ring true it speaks to the movie’s big heart and excess of empathy.
Boy Meets Girl belongs to Hendley, who wasn’t an actress when Schaeffer sought her out for the film but delivers a performance rich in humor, pathos and humanity.
Schaeffer’s film ends on hokey note with its protagonist going viral on Youtube but I legitimately got a little choked up by the end, which is not something I thought I would ever say about an Eric Schaeffer movie.
I’m apparently softening in my old age. That’s good because I have to write about My Life’s In Turnaround and its late in the game sequel They’re Out of the Business, the last movie I reviewed when I was at The A.V. Club the first time around, for The Fractured Mirror, my upcoming book on movies about making movies.
Will I enjoy these films as well? Probably not but I will be going into them with an open mind and a willingness, even an eagerness, to be pleasantly surprised. God knows I was pleasantly surprised by Boy Meets Girl.
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