506 La Travestie

[MichaelB]

LA TRAVESTIE
(Yves Boisset, 1988, 109 mins)
Release date: 20 July 2026
Limited Edition Blu-ray (UK and US premiere)

Pre-order the UK or US release.


A stark departure from his other works, Yves Boisset’s La Travestie is a tactically abrasive look at patriarchy and identity. Lawyer Nicole (Zabou Breitman, La Crise) is driven by frustration and male hypocrisy in both her personal and professional lives to leave her law firm and her hometown, and to reinvent herself as a man.

Arriving in Paris, Nicole makes friends, and soon those friends turn to lovers, and lovers turn to enemies. She suffocates in the identities she creates and lets rejection make a villain of her, until insecurities turn to tragedy and she has nowhere to turn.

Centring on female psychosexuality, without demonisation, the film presents challenging gender dynamics and trans imagery at a time when neither was common within mainstream cinema. It also utilises genre tropes to complex ends, never losing sight that it is, first and foremost, a character study with much to say about the plight of women in contemporary France in the late 1980s.


INDICATOR LIMITED EDITION BLU-RAY SPECIAL FEATURES

• 4K restoration from the original negative
• Original mono audio
• Girls and Boys Come Out to Play (2026): video essay by film critic and historian Alexandra Heller-Nicholas exploring the film’s themes of gender and power
• Image gallery: promotional and publicity materials
• Script gallery: complete dialogue and continuity script
• New and improved English translation subtitles
• Limited edition exclusive booklet with a new essay by Georgia Humphreys, excerpts from the film’s press kit, an overview of critical responses, and film credits
• UK premiere on Blu-ray
• Limited edition of 4,000 copies for the UK and US
• More to be announced
• All features subject to change

#PHILE506B
BBFC cert: 18 TBC
REGION A+B
EAN: 5060697925456

[domino harvey]

Man, within a year there’s been like half a dozen Boisset films in English friendly editions despite no real name recognition in English territories. But Deville, that’s going too far... Interesting to see La Crise credited for Zabou (you’d think they’d pick Cuisine et Dependances or Le Premier Jour… for English audiences, as I don’t think that one ever had an English friendly home video release in US/UK), wonder if that one’s in the hopper

EDIT Looking up her filmography and the comedy from this year with a bald Laurent Lafitte looks incredible!

[knives]

And she’s even in a Deville film!

[Murdoch]

This sounds very intriguing. I haven't seen anything by Boisset before but I'm tempted to blind buy from the description. Anyone have any input on the film?

[MichaelB]

Final specs:

[GaryC]

There's also an advisory on the cover slip (not the disc itself) regarding a sequence of flashing lights which might adversely affect someone with photosensitive epilepsy.

[tenia]

Final specs:

I believe it's Midi Auvergne, and not Midi Auverge !

[Murdoch]

This sounds very intriguing. I haven't seen anything by Boisset before but I'm tempted to blind buy from the description. Anyone have any input on the film?

I just watched it and wow, after suffering through two of Boisset's thrillers from the Kino set (a very bad revenge movie and then a forgettable child kidnapping story), I approached this with hesitant interest, but was floored by it. A lonely chameleon, genderless and violent, moves through the world, stealing identities and love. Insatiable, irritable, they discard lovers with reckless abandon as they hurtle into oblivion. Describing the plot would only detract from the experience, as it feels like a human tailspin caught on film, a person moving further and further away from their identity until nothing is left. Zabou's movement between man and woman feels part and parcel with rhe character the further along the film progresses, rather than the gimmick I feared it would be, as each feels by the end an intrinsic part of her character. Yet Nicole, Nick, Solange, Christine... suffer from a central loneliness that anchors the film instead of letting it spin around untethered, and that's what makes the final moments particularly unnerving. Highly recommended, very much worth picking up.