Tomboy succeeds in its apparent aim of providing a subtle exploration of the reality of gender disillusion. The subtlety however, is also this film’s downfall. Tomboy attempts to provide a light-hearted, yet conservative analysis of gender confusion/discontentment. However, this is far too controversial and complicated an issue to be treated as softly and ambiguously as it is here.

The film follows the lives of a bourgeois French family, who have moved into a new and thus, daunting country neighbourhood, with their two daughters, Laure and Jeanne. The former and oldest of the pair has ‘issues’. She frequently assesses her body in a grimly self-deprecating, anxious manner. To complicate matters further, in greeting her neighbours, she declares herself to be a boy of the name Mikael. Why? This is a question for which we never receive an answer like many other parts of the film.

Laure attempts to fit in with her new-found peers, with a masculine, "macho" façade that works a charm with the isolated, single female of the local youths, Lisa. She is immediately affected by Laure. Their increasingly passionate relationship is over-looked by the others, who are convinced by the latter’s faux confidence, as a boyish boy, who is more than capable of scoring penalties in soccer and pushing bullies in the water. Inevitably, everything gets complicated when Jeanne gets involved. She is eager to help Laure, warming to the idea of a strong, protective brother who is intimidating to his peers, but affectionate with "sis".  The consequences are inevitably noxious. The fraud of Mikael is quickly, regrettably revealed. And so the film ends.

Director Céline Sciamma creates a decisively mild tone in her concluding scene: Lisa’s calm acquaintance of Laure’s true gender identity. Lacking bias, the film sits on the fence, allowing for viewer interpretation of the moral issues raised.

It is easy to leave Tomboy thinking that you have witnessed the absence of a film. You don’t know what Sciamma’s point is; if she has no point, then what was the sense of the film being made in the first place? Moreover then, what is the point of watching the film?