The Clan’s Heir Is a Trans Woman (2013)

I don’t want to pretend that The Clan’s Heir Is a Trans Woman is something that it isn’t, but it is possible for cis people to stumble and bumble their way into making a movie about trans people that isn’t cloying or patronizing but is, somehow, still capable of warming the heart. I think the secret is that, despite the title, Hitoshi Ozawa — the director, writer, and star of the film — has made a movie about his character’s relationship to transness, as opposed to trying to make some grand statement about human nature through the lens of the divine feminine as provided by the transsexual.

That leads to one of the movie’s larger disappointments, which is that neither Nana, the titular heir, nor Bell, the woman who plays her, have much to do. She’s gorgeous, of course, a hostess at a trans bar called Guppy (because the girls serve fish), but when she’s dragged back into the yakuza life she was ostensibly kicked out of when she came out 15 years before the events here, all she really does is cook, clean, and apologize for setting off a chain of events that result in a gangland war.

Part of this is likely due to The Clan’s Heir Is a Trans Woman being produced with the lightning speed necessitated by Ozawa’s breakneck schedule. Dude is credited with starring in 456 films! That this is one of the 37 he directed and 31 he wrote suggests a kind of attachment to the subject, but given that this was one of 25 films he starred in back in 2013, that attachment means that the movie got made, not that it got a second pass to lend more agency to its trans woman star.

Instead, Ozawa uses The Clan’s Heir Is a Trans Woman as a referendum on the kind of character for whom he is something of an archetype, the stern mobster. He finds a lot of soul in this particular rendering. Like, you seek this one out for its finale, but whenever his Ryu opens up about his past, it’s arresting, the pain and regret that informs his surprising empathy and love for Nana as authentic as anything you’re likely to find in the best films about straight people figuring out their shit about people who aren’t straight.

It does stumble and it does bumble to get there, but I don’t know enough about trans culture in Japan in the 2010s to know how upset I should be on my sisters’ behalf re: The Clan’s Heir Is a Trans Woman‘s depiction of male reactions to the mere existence of trans women, positive or negative. The chaser is charming, the hatred is more ambient than pointed, and Guppy’s seems like a fun hang. No trans women in the movie get to shoot a gun or swing a sword, though, and that’s the real disappointment.