Z, a transman, grapples with change in this truthful and heartwarming indie drama about finding your voice post-coming out.
★★★★☆
In Really Happy Someday, Breton Lalama’s Z is transitioning, a journey that is often misrepresented in the media. However, this film, with its gentle cinematography and a script that draws from real life, offers an authentic and non-reductive depiction of gender-affirming care. J Stevens and Lalama, who co-wrote the script, have created a space for a nuanced look at one person’s life amid transition, capturing the full spectrum of emotions involved in that process.
Before transitioning, Z is a successful musical theatre performer, but his changing voice causes him to flunk an audition, quickly leading him to lose his agent and, by extension, his biggest passion. We watch as Z tries to find a way forward, learning to accept this difference and adapt to his changing body. Z meets various people who help guide him forward, such as vocal coach Shelly (Ali Garrison) and his manager at his bar job, Santi (Xavier Lopez).
At the centre is an immersive performance from Lalama, filmed during his real-life transition over the year of shooting. His performance is continuously nuanced as he portrays Z’s pain as stemming from societal expectations rather than a regret for his identity. The hand-held filming style, alongside Lalama’s performance, makes it easy to forget that the narrative is fictional—a testament to how sensitively the filmmakers were able to construct this character and his story. Lalama successfully and authentically portrays the internal conflict of a man becoming closer to his true self whilst losing what gave him a career, without falling into the trope of presenting his experience as solely traumatic.
Tropes of the coming-of-age genre are repurposed for a character in their twenties, reflecting a common transgender experience in which coming out thrusts the person back into the emotional headspace of their teenage years. By using the coming-of-age formula, Stevens created the space for the complexity of gender identity to be fully explored through Z’s eyes, keeping the audience engaged and intrigued.
Throughout Really Happy Someday, tender moments of queer joy serve as a powerful counterpoint to the challenges Z faces. The most affecting snapshots into Z’s life are the mundane ones, such as Z taking his testosterone shot perched on a window ledge or laughing with Santi when he unexpectedly comes out. In a socio-political landscape growing more hostile towards the transgender community, Stevens’ humanisation of Z, albeit natural as a queer filmmaker, is also radical in comparison to the mostly reductive canon of transgender cinema that historically minimises characters down to their insecurities.
Stevens and Lalama focus on Z’s emotional state rather than making a larger commentary about transitioning for all transgender people, making for a more meaningful, complex story. Z is allowed to be messy and vulnerable throughout, the film becoming uncomfortably realistic at times. The effect of the low budget is apparent in the somewhat underdeveloped visual style, but the realism that results allows Lalama’s performance to take precedence, and leaves the fictional narrative feeling more like a documentary.
The Verdict
Breton Lalama proves himself as a strong emotional anchor as he and director J Stevens portray a uniquely personal story of the transgender experience, highlighting the importance of a range of queer voices in independent cinema.
Words by Isaac Minah
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