Don't Call Me Son

By: Amos Lassen

"Don't Call Me Son"
Tangled Family Ties
Amos Lassen
Pierre (Naomi Nero) a free-spirited teenager who plays in a rock band, has a penchant for wearing g-strings under his jeans and seems to be quite comfortable having sex with either girls or boys. He experiments with his feminine side by occasionally cross-dressing and wearing lipstick in the privacy of his bathroom at home. Their working class "mother", Aracy (Daniela Nefussi) has been raising him and his younger sister Jacqueline (Lais Dias) alone. Their father is dead. Their lives are shattered one day with a visit from the police who reveal that Aracy had stolen Pierre when he was a baby in hospital, and for the past 17 years his biological parents have been searching from him. With Aracy now behind bars Pierre is reunited with Gloria (also played by Nefussi) and Matheus (Matheus Nachtergaele) an affluent traditional and bourgeois couple and their younger son Joca (Daniel Botelho) and they try to offer him everything he could possibly want but he resents this and does not feel of their family.

Pierre finds himself besieged by strangers that he has to now accept as relations, calling him by a name he doesn't recognize as his own. Director Anna Muylaert handles an atmosphere charged with intensely conflicting expectations with a light touch, and sparks of humor.
Pierre is at that stage where his identity is still not formed. He is a guitarist in a band and somewhat androgynous and takes advantage of the attention he receives from both girls and boys. He experiments with make up, and in private, dresses in women's clothes. His passive nature is shaken when he learns that he is not who he thought he was, Pierre, son of Aracy, but Felipe, the oldest son of Gloria and Matheus. (It is interesting twist, the same actress plays both Aracy and Gloria, although she is unrecognizable in the two different roles)
Pierre is suddenly flung into the well-meaning love of his biological parents and initially retreats into himself, grieving the loss of Aracy in prison and daunted and a bit repulsed by his real try to shape him into a more suitable, respectable son, Pierre strikes back and holds on to the identity that he was only just beginning to explore and this becomes an act of rebellion. He begins dressing in women's clothes. He is angry and not just because his mother is in jail but also because his sister is also dealing with the same issues as he does and has been to live with her biological parents.

Everything comes to a head at a family outing that ends in a shouting match and fight. No longer able to contain himself anymore, Pierre screams that he was stolen twice- once from the hospital when he was a baby, and now again from his 'real' mother and sister, and he blames Maurizio and Gloria totally for this.
Muylaert handles the story with a great deal of sensitivity and her sympathy lies fairly and squarely with the two children who she considers the victims in this scenario. Pierre's queerness is an incidental part of his story and it would be totally wrong to call this just a LGBT movie.
The film was inspired by a real-life event involving the of a little boy in Brasília and it follows the trajectory of teenage Pierre's queerness, from being comfortably administered in his working-class home to gaining monstrous status when he's to live with his bourgeois biological parents. Once Pierre's mother is arrested for having stolen him as a child, he learns to wield his queerness as a method of survival, as an existential claim and a scream. Instead of safely tucking away his fondness of garter belts and other feminine attire in the privacy of locked bathrooms, he now demands that his "new" biological parents buy him a dress instead of the preppy polo shirts they want him to have. His provocations are devoid of any adolescent gratuitousness, even if that's precisely how his biological parents will choose to categorize them.
Muylaert sets up the film's dramatic core in a series of quick and highly efficient scenes where Pierre sees his life unraveling before his eyes, yet seems generally more concerned with his own sexual identity. Keeping the action almost exclusively glued to his viewpoint, the script reveals how something as major as one's true lineage might not matter at first to a teenager exploring the transience of gender as a means to find out who he is.

However, the question of Pierre's true nature comes to the forefront when he's to move into the swank household of Gloria and Matheus. They offer him everything he wants, and the sequence where Gloria shows off her home to Pierre/Felipe is a heartbreaker that shows that all the money in the world can't compensate for the loss of a son who may be coming back to the nest way too late, and for whom such human comforts are meaningless.
Tempers flare when Pierre, who tries his best to be polite at first starts to reject a family whose bourgeois ways are not to his taste or way of life.