Ma vie en Rose

Why is it that so many films about being different are all the same? French director Alain Berliner's often cloying trifle Ma vie en Rose has a lot of the right ideas but dresses them up in such flimsy, feel-good frills and candy-colored flights of fancy that he softens them to a powder puff.

Ludovic (Georges DuFresnes) is a young boy who believes he's a girl. He dresses up in his mother's clothes and proposes marriage to a another little boy, which does not go over well since his neighborhood is a stereotypically uptight, conformist suburb and the other boy is the son of his father's boss. His parents, though, prove extraordinarily tolerant of his gender preference, to the point where Ludovic's search for self-expression seems more like self-indulgence. Ma vie en rose creates some emotional involvement as the family begins to break down under the social pressure, but as with the Barbie-like Pam doll about whom Ludovic has charmlessly kitsch fantasies, Berliner finds too-easy refuge from its tough issues in glib camp and political correctness. At the Kendall Square.

-- Peter Keough