Jason Sondhi
Winner of the 2015 Iris Film Prize for best LGBTQ narrative short, Arkasha Stevenson’s AFI graduation film quietly slipped online last week, and definitely deserves your attention. A stylish, but unvarnished depiction of a young trans woman compelled to venture into the underground market for breast augmentation, the film makes for queasy watching in the best kind of way. In short order Stevenson and first-time film actress Diamond Cruz craft a character you genuinely bond with, and thrust her into a painful situation. Despite the harm she risks, the economical script lays bare the compelling internal and external tensions that make such choice seem reasonable.
From the start of the film Diamond is uncomfortable with her body. An early scene in the film sets up the premise and hints at the danger—lying in bed with her friend, the pair discuss Diamond getting a boob job, even as her friend tends to an ugly looking chest wound caused from her own recent augmentation. Diamond self-consciously cups her own small breasts looking tentative, but hopeful. Stevenson and cinematographer Marianne Williams put the bodies of their actors on display, but not in a prurient way, as the frankness of the bodies in their state, and the distance they are from their owner’s desired ideal, is necessary context to the motivations that animate what follows.
On the way to meeting up again in the evening, Diamond is rudely yelled out to by a stereotypical bro—”that’s a dude!” he loudly proclaims to his friends in a self-satisfied manner. This simple and brief interaction establishes an important motivation for Diamond’s character—she wants to pass. This sentiment is backed up when she finally makes it to the underground “clinic” and asks for “only” a B-cup. Does this motivation make Diamond and her desperation more sympathetic? After all, she isn’t motivated by vanity, she simply doesn’t want to be ostracized for being her true self as a woman. That question and sentiment is a complicated one however.
In a film with only 3 major characters, the role and depiction of Prayleen (trans-activist Maria Roman) as the person offering to inject Diamond ends up being very important. In a certain reading of the film she is its villain—pushing a medical procedure that she is in no way qualified to provide, she is loud, and unapologetically glam in that way trans women are so often stereotyped as. Seemingly callous to the danger involved, she is also rude and domineering—when Diamond shows (understandable) trepidation while on the operating table, Prayleen threatens to keep half her money if she backs out. Yet, Prayleen’s brusqueness is also a consequence of her age and experience. She pointedly gets real with Diamond, telling her that her hopes to pass will ultimately fail. She is trans, and attempting to escape or obscure that fact is a denial that is itself dangerous. Prayleen in this sense is a tough-love mom urging Diamond to embrace her trans identity, knowing the pain that comes from running away from it.
In case you’re curious, the depictions of the film are all too real. In an interview with Vice last week, Roman confirms that she herself underwent the exact situation the film dramatizes, and while she has suffered complications from that decision, she has not regretted it. While Vessels inspires a kind of horror movie dread, Stevenson is careful to be as even-handed and non-judgmental as possible. Issues such as “passing” and the desperation of individuals lacking access to medical care are thoughtfully woven in without dramatic pretension. Yet while this empathetic sensitivity to lived experience is apparent, the film is no way opting for a verité approach. Artfully shot, with glowing neon blues and pinks used for thematic effects, and microscopic photography periodically breaking up the scenes, the film wrings visual dynamism out of straightforward scenes.
A female-lead and executed project, Vessels was the MFA capstone for Stevenson and Williams, as well as editor Steph Zenee Perez, production designer Andrea Arce Duval, and producer Halee Bernard (who subsequently produced two films on Short of the Week, Pretext and After Sophie). Stevenson has gone on to direct 6 episodes of SyFy’s anthology show Channel Zero.