Ma Vie En Rose

By RICHARD CORLISS

The effect is stunning: a seven-year-old in lipstick and a borrowed pink dress. Anyway, the sight stuns the parents of the boy who makes his entrance so gaily bedecked. He is Ludovic (Georges du Fresne), a sweet child convinced he's a girl. No point in lecturing the lad; Ludo blithely pursues his obsession. Of a school chum, he says, "We're going to marry when I'm not a boy."

In the genially subversive Franco-Belgian Ma Vie en Rose, the town where Ludo and his family live is cheerily color-coordinated (each garage door is painted a different pastel), but the emotions that the boy's cross-dressing provokes are darker. Everyone goes instantly agog. Wives scold; husbands threaten. Schoolboys turn into bullies, ready to take the natural law into their own hands. The film, directed by Alain Berliner from an original script by Chris vander Stappen, has the scheme of a socially fretful TV movie. Yet at heart, Ma Vie en Rose is a delightful comedy, both in its buoyant dream sequences and in Ludo's vagrant, clumsy stabs at embryonic machismo. Staring at himself in the mirror, he shoots off an imaginary gun, just like the other kids, and--he's really trying--adjusts his crotch.

This is no tract; all the characters have reasons for their outbursts. But the film is most sympathetic to Ludo's desperate, deadpan certitude that he'd enjoy being a girl. Like last year's magnificent Ponette, Ma Vie en Rose is an inside report--neither cloying nor condescending--from the enchanted, irradiated island of childhood.

--R.C.