3 hours Ago By Siddhant Adlakha
A winding and at-times enraging medical exposé, Grace Hughes-Hallett ’s feature debut “ The Secret of Me ” is stylistically straightforward, but emotionally self-assured. Although it has a litany of subjects, it unravels its secondary stories by connecting them to a central character: a girl named Kristi from Baton Rouge, who would go on to discover shocking secrets about her upbringing as a teenager in the 1990s. In the present, various interviewees recall Kristi wistfully, including a bearded, middle-aged man named Jim.
Minutes into the movie, Jim reveals that he is, or rather once was, Kristi — and the obvious conclusion one might draw does not apply. “This is not a transgender story,” he says. On its surface, the movies shares some structural and thematic similarities with Tim Wardle’s “Three Identical Strangers,” which Hughes-Hallet produced.
Both are nature vs. nurture docs about adults discovering shocking medical histories and malpractice dating back to before their births. However, the way that “The Secret of Me” disseminates information deviates from Wardle’s approach, in order to avoid turning people’s bodies into objects of shock or excess speculation.
It isn’t really a twist to mention that Jim is intersex, meaning he was born with genitals that didn’t conform to a traditional male-female binary, since this information comes to light in an early scene. The film has enough of its own swerves that it needn’t sensationalize its subject. Rather, how they were treated and raised (in Jim’s case, as a girl) is where the real surprises lie.
The doc is otherwise gentle and unwaveringly frank about the intersex community, which allows subjects like Jim to be incredibly vulnerable on camera. Jim is technically correct in his introduction, in that “The Secret of Me” isn’t about any transgender people (though he frequently affirms his respect for the trans community). However, the movie’s framing has widespread contemporary resonance, and an enormous overlap with how trans issues are discussed, particularly in how individuals who deviate from strict gender norms are so readily demonized by others.
In that vein, conversations on trans identity are likely to be many viewers’ reference point for the movie’s subject matter, but Hughes-Hallet’s approach is remarkably detailed and informative, going beyond that lens. And yet, as verbose as the movie can be (and in some sense, needs to be, as a corrective to decades of misinformation), what goes unsaid is just as powerful. The movie opens on the image of an American flag in Louisiana, rooting its story in questions of not just gender identity, but American identity.
As the film introduces Kristi (people, including Jim, refer to Kristy as a separate person, creating the illusion of the character’s discoveries in the ’90s unfolding in the present), the portrait of where Jim grew up, in a conservative southern town, implicates religious zealotry and a lack of access to information as conditions for a perfect storm of oppression. At a time when several U.S.
states ( including Louisiana ) are trying to ban books with LGBTQ themes or characters, the film’s nearly 30-year-old central narrative seems unnervingly relevant. This cloud looms over “The Secret of Me” as it travels back further than Jim’s birth in the mid-’70s. Through archival footage and a handful of out-of-focus re-enactments set in the 1960s, the movie traces the domino effect of invasive surgical interventions, forced gender designations and medical secrecy that led Jim (and many others like him) to be raised in ways that had destructive ripple effects for them and their families.
With this in mind, the narrative is also propelled by the possibility that Jim might be able to sit across one of the people responsible for what was done to him — a riveting confrontation to which the film eventually builds. However, as dour, depressing and wince-inducing as its revelations can be, “The Secret of Me” is also firmly rooted in the discovery of community, which Hughes-Hallet builds on the back of footage from DIY documentaries made by or about its intersex subjects decades prior. Alongside its lengthy sit-down segments with Jim — who pushes past his weary anxiety until he can unburden himself before the camera — this yields a cinematic counter-narrative to rigid notions of how people ought to be, even at the cost of their happiness.
It’s a film of righteous fury, told through a lens that creates intimate adoration for Jim, who — although his experiences and activism might make him seem heroic — is ultimately an average person just seeking closure and self-affirmation. Few things in cinema are more empathetic..
