***/****
directed by Michael Del Monte
Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs April 26-May 6, 2018 at Toronto’s Bloor Cinema. Visit the fest’s official site for more details.
by Angelo Muredda Bodybuilder and ex-marine Janae Marie Kroczaleski’s negotiation of the gender-fraught world of weightlifting after coming out as trans is given a refreshingly straightforward, fly-on-the-wall treatment in Michael Del Monte’s Transformer. The story of a world-championship-winning power builder, affectionately nicknamed “Kroc,” taking some critical early steps in presenting herself socially and professionally as a woman after a long and successful career in two of the most masculinist professions possible reads on paper like the stuff of an exploitative human-interest story. But Del Monte resists the temptation to amp up the inherent drama of a perfectly well-adjusted and engaging person’s life, or to linger, as other woke cis appropriators of trans stories have done, on the metaphorical dimensions of his subject’s transformation by fixating on either her past or the moment of transition. Instead, he recruits Janae as a collaborator in her story in the present, allowing her frank voice and the particular issues she faces today–about whether to maintain or tweak her muscular frame through clothes and exercise regimes, for instance, or whether to undergo vocal-cord surgery–to steer him in more fruitful directions.
Though the film is not immune to certain doc-by-numbers tropes–from unmotivated drone shots that situate us in Janae’s run-down childhood stomping grounds of Ypsilanti, Michigan to intrusive indie-twang music cues–its otherwise relatively crisp aesthetic nicely serves the brief of observing Janae as she walks into old, familiar spaces with a burgeoning new sense of herself as a person, a family member, and an athlete. Janae’s non-diegetic voiceovers about subjects like the extent to which prohibitively expensive procedures such as vocal-cord surgery may be life-saving to the people who need them are nicely counterbalanced by alternately revelatory and mundane footage, cleanly staged in follow-shots and still tableaux, of her continuing to live her life–as a parent and as a bodybuilder–through what might seem like seismic upheavals. Most poignant here is a scene where Janae does her makeup at the kitchen table while her kids play video games in the next room and casually praise her for working hard to realize herself, as well as a moment where her old training buddies at the gym guide her through new workouts while awkwardly but sincerely fumbling their way through complimenting her remarkable body. It’s the directness and non-prescriptive nature of this footage, its refusal to explain away any apparent contradictions in Janae’s life, that makes Transformer a worthy portrait of a subject who, at the end of the day, is most compelling for her consistency amidst enormous changes.
