Before disappearing, quite literally, beneath the waves near the fabled “Vas-y Vas-y” islands, yes, that’s their nickname, and yes, it’s ominously fitting, Michel Ricaud left behind a curious legacy. A prolific figure in French pornographic cinema, Ricaud was known for his unapologetic embrace of the erotic. But among his oeuvre, one film stands out as an outlier, an experiment that straddles exploitation and empathy, salaciousness and sincerity. That film is Et il voulut être une femme (“And He Wanted to Be a Woman”), a 1977 documentary-fiction hybrid centered on trans identity, transition, and the quiet violence of societal alienation.
Ostensibly pitched as “a psychological, medical and human document,” Et il voulut être une femme drapes itself in the language of social commentary, but the stitching is visibly uneven. It contains interviews, some authentic, some suspiciously stagy, micro-trottoirs of random pedestrians reacting to the concept of sex change, and the clinical grotesquerie of gender-affirming surgery filmed in unwavering detail. It doesn’t flinch, even when the audience desperately wants it to.
The film’s central figure is Elysa, born in Brazil, assigned male at birth, and now a young trans woman navigating the seedy and seductive margins of 1970s Paris. She arrives from Rio at the age of 20 with little more than a suitcase and a photo of herself in drag, her earliest glimpse of who she might become. She survives, as many did, through sex work, saving for the ultimate transformation that would bring her body closer to her truth.
Ricaud’s camera follows her as she dances, seduces, and quietly dreams of the life she hopes to lead. The surgery sequence, with its scalpels and silence, is not just a climax but a rupture. It’s where documentary intent blurs into voyeurism, and it’s also what made the film infamous.
Much has been speculated about Elysa. According to Ricaud and the film’s producer, Jean Carton, Elysa agreed to participate in the film to fund her surgery. The rumor, and it’s difficult to verify, as so much is in the shadows, is that shortly after the film’s release, Elysa was murdered in a Parisian street, possibly in connection with underworld retaliation or debts.
Her death adds a cruel, tragic note to an already heavy film. Whether Elysa was exploited or empowered by this role is a question with no clear answer. What is certain is that she became, posthumously, a symbol of trans visibility and vulnerability at a time when both were virtually invisible in mainstream French media.
Et il voulut être une femme remains one of the very few cinematic records of transfeminine existence in 1970s France. It captures the intersections of identity, immigration, sex work, and medical transition, topics that even today are rarely given honest screen time, let alone in 1977.
The trans women depicted in the film, including Elysa, speak of their hopes and humiliations with heartbreaking candor. There is no support system in place, no safety net. Their survival hinges on beauty, performance, and luck.
.jpg)
One of the film’s greatest virtues is that it records this, even if it sometimes fails to process it with care.
Critics at the time, and since, have pointed out the uneasy mix of fact and fiction. Some interviews appear rehearsed. Micro-trottoirs, which should represent spontaneous public opinion, are often so neatly quotable that their veracity feels suspect. Ricaud was, after all, not a documentarian by trade, but a pornographer with a flair for dramatics and aesthetics.
The film is frequently compared to Doris Wishman’s Let Me Die a Woman (1978), another quasi-documentary with similar themes. Both flirt with exploitation but land, perhaps accidentally, on something deeper: an unintentional ethnography of trans suffering under cis curiosity. They may fail as activist manifestos but succeed, oddly enough, as time capsules.
The surgical sequence in Et il voulut être une femme is perhaps the most discussed, and most criticized, element. It features footage of real gender-affirming surgery, filmed with clinical detachment but edited for dramatic tension. Today, this would be considered an ethical breach unless shown with explicit consent and context.
In 1977, however, the spectacle of the operation played into both the fascination and revulsion surrounding trans bodies. Ricaud likely intended it as a statement of transformation, perhaps even rebirth. But stripped of its patient’s voice, it becomes something else, an object lesson in the medicalization and dehumanization of gender-nonconforming people.
Initially released through VHS under the PROSERPINE label, the film enjoyed surprising commercial success. Its theatrical run, however, was abruptly curtailed, reportedly due to pressure from authorities or perhaps due to the controversy stirred by its explicit content. Ricaud was disappointed; this was, in his mind, a “serious” work, a break from his usual fare.
Over the decades, Et il voulut être une femme disappeared from public view, passed around in bootleg copies, surviving through whispered anecdotes and late-night screenings. Like so many queer cultural artifacts, its afterlife is unofficial, underground, and fiercely protected by those who remember.
What remains today is a film that is both flawed and vital. Et il voulut être une femme cannot be wholly defended, but it cannot be dismissed either. Its power lies not in its execution but in its existence. It dared to center a trans woman of color. It documented a process, social, psychological, surgical, that few dared to show. And it immortalized a life that, like so many, ended too soon and too violently.
In the contemporary trans cinematic canon, Ricaud’s film sits awkwardly. It lacks the sensitivity of Tomboy (2011) or the introspection of Disclosure (2020). But it is also older, rawer, and arguably more real. It offers no hero, no arc, no uplift. Just a woman trying to survive in a city that commodifies, romanticizes, and ultimately discards her.
And maybe that, for all its roughness, is precisely the point.
Image credits: dailymotion
.jpg)
No comments:
Post a Comment