Different for Girls
(1996)
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Karl Foyle and Paul Prentice were best mates at school in the Seventies. But when they meet again in present-day London things are definitely not the same. Karl is now Kim, and she has no desire to stir up the past while she's busy forging a neat new life. Prentice, on the other hand, has charm, but is a social disaster area stuck in a dead-end job. His main talent is for getting them both into trouble. |
What's Rupert Graves to do? His best mate (Steven Mackintosh) has had a sex change since they last met, and now he's finding himself attracted to her. That's the dilemma in director Richard Spence's decidedly offbeat romantic comedy. What follows is sometimes awkward, sometimes emotionally remote but, because of Graves and Mackintosh's fine acting, always watchable. Thanks to the perceptive dialogue and barbed humour — courtesy of Tony Marchant, writer of TV's Great Expectations and Bad Blood — plus a lively punk soundtrack, what could have been a yawn-inducing slice of political correctness turns into a heart-warming tale of sexual confusion and love against the odds.
Halliwell's Film Guide
A heady and gritty mix of transsexual romance, police corruption and social comment, it at least ventures into new territory.