Von Trapped

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Available Summary:

"Hairdresser Maria is fixated by The Sound of Music (1965) - it was the film she saw the night she was jilted 18 years ago. In a bid to confront her demons, Maria decides to travel to Salzburg, but with her mother and teenage offspring in tow she gets more than she bargained for." -IMDb.

Jack's Summary:

I was pleasantly surprised by this one! The trans male character is certainly a collection of tropes, but his characterisation and ending could have been much worse, particularly considering when this came out.

Lee, Maria's trans son, is first introduced walking with his girlfriend, Tammy Jade, down the street. Believing that he has been checking out other women, she is jealous and yelling at him. Later, he is shown stealing clothing from a store to fund transition surgeries.

Tammy Jade next appears with Lee in a pub. Unaware that he is a trans man, she interrupts his pool game to claim that he has gotten her pregnant, and therefore they must get married. In actuality, she is not pregnant, and is just lying because she doesn't want to lose him to anybody else. Figuring that she must have cheated on him in order to become pregnant, Lee storms out in anger.

Soon after this, Lee decides that he doesn't care if Tammy Jade is pregnant by someone else. He buys (or potentially steals) an engagement ring for her, saying that he will raise the baby as his own. She happily accepts.

Tammy Jade reveals the engagement to a woman named Madison, who previously dated Lee and is aware of his trans status. Madison, in response to seeing Tammy Jade's ring, calls her a lesbian, indirectly misgendering Lee and outing him as a trans man. Tammy Jade's brother, Ryan, is present at the time and hears this comment. In a scene which seems to mock Tammy Jade for her reaction, rather than mocking Lee, she tries to pull off the engagement ring in a panic, hitting her brother in the process.

Later, when Lee is walking alone at night, he is attacked by three men, one of whom is Ryan. They pin him to the ground, unzip his trousers, and laugh when they find the sock he was packing with. But viewers are not being encouraged to laugh along; this attack is presented as a horrible act. When this film originally aired in 2004, it may have gotten some audiences thinking about trans male struggles for the very first time. Tammy Jade comes across the group, is horrified by what her brother and his friends are doing, and stops them.

Lee goes home and takes a bath, crying. Viewers see that he is wearing bandages to bind his chest, which is par for the course in the early-2000s. That said, please don't follow Lee's example in the modern day. Learn more here.

Lee goes to his mother that night, hugging her and crying. He had previously refused to accompany her on a holiday to Salzburg, due to his passport photo being feminine, but decides that traveling will be a good escape.

To Lee's surprise, Tammy Jade follows him to Salzburg. The pair go to a café together, to talk. After admitting that she was never pregnant, and was just afraid of losing him, she says, "I'm so sorry, Lee. When our Ryan did what he did, it got me thinking... I don't care what you are. I love you! I do!"

The pair hold hands and then, for the first and only time in the movie, viewers are encouraged to laugh at Lee directly. The source of the humour, though, is something decidedly non-trans; his drink, which is topped with cream, gives him a moustache. This is a joke which could occur with literally any character. It is not a mockery of trans people as a population. If anything, it's just a gentle joke reinforcing how youthful Lee and Tammy Jade are at eighteen years old, leaning on a universal theme of adorable young love to disarm the seriousness of what the pair were previously talking about. I find that fantastic.

Lee, talking with his mother in his next scene, reveals that he intends to medically transition. "I wanna have an operation. I'm gonna be a fella. A proper fella. 'Cause I am, mum. I'm a fella. You do understand, don't you? Nan does." He also states that, after transition surgeries, he will marry Tammy Jade. His mother is overwhelmed by these announcements, and Lee leaves when she begins to cry.

At this point in the main plot, Maria, Lee's mother, encounters Larry, her former fiancé and Lee's father. After being left at the altar by him eighteen years ago, Maria is determined to have dinner with him and get some answers. Kath, Maria's mother and Lee's nan, is adamant that Maria should not go.

While Kath and Maria are arguing about this, Kath yells, "He abandoned my bloody granddaughter!" Lee and Tammy Jade, who are in the same room, flatly correct her, saying, "Son," in unison. Maria replies, "Yeah, but she's not the only one he abandoned, is she?" Again, Lee and Tammy Jade say flatly, "He," in unison.

I really love this dialogue. Tammy Jade's expressions, particularly, are shocked and almost scandalised by Lee being referred to incorrectly. The joke isn't that Lee is trans. The joke is that other people are getting it wrong, and they're being ridiculous.

At dinner with Larry, Maria finds out that, in fact, Larry did not abandon her. Kath, believing that Larry was not the right fit for her daughter, told him that Maria had gotten pregnant by somebody else, and that the wedding was not going ahead. The pair realise they have both been tricked by Kath, and they reconcile. During this conversation, Larry finds out that the baby was actually his. When he asks whether the baby is a boy or a girl, Maria hesitates, and then says, "I had a little girl. Called her Liesl. But..." The scene cuts before we know how she explains Lee's transition, or how Larry reacts.

The next day, Lee meets Larry for the first time, in a scene which is genuinely lovely. It is clear that, despite Maria's complex feelings about her son's transition, she made sure to explain Lee's true identity to Larry.

Larry walks towards Lee with a big smile and says, "You must be Lee. My son." Lee takes a moment to absorb this, shocked by what he's hearing. The pair walk together, with Larry saying that he always wanted a son, asking, "How long have you been living like a fella, then?" Lee replies, "Long as I can remember." Referring to a medical transition and surgery in particular, Larry asks, "You're determined to go through with it?" When Lee nods, Larry says, "Fair play to you, lad." He then offers to financially support Lee and pay for his medical transition.

I was surprised by how trans-positive this film ended up being, for 2004. In Lee's last scene, he's misgendered by his mother, which felt unnecessary and a bit disappointing, but I still reckon this film handled a trans male character relatively well. Other aspects of the movie are pretty dated, inevitably, but I'm glad I gave it a watch!