Sasha has a new life. A new town, a new institute, a desire to make friends and a secret that has led to her having to move in the middle of the course. Thus it begins, roughly, ‘About Sasha‘ (Chair Tendre), an interesting and notable French miniseries that Disney+ premiered this past Wednesday.
Coming from French public television (it is originally from France TV Slash), over ten episodes of between twenty and thirty minutes, this adolescent series leads a protagonist (Angèle Metzger) who discovers that they have hidden from you all your life that you are intersex and that all the surgeries he has undergone from a very young age have been to “correct his disease.”
With this premise, Yaël Langmann’s script unfolds before us a portrait as intimate as it is intense around the affectivity in adolescence, to the relationship with the sexual and the genital and that attempt to fit in and feel above all “normal” or, at least, accepted (another thing is that she accepts herself). And at the center of it all is the trauma and abuse, both psychological and physical, that has scarred Sasha.
Sasha/Sasha
In tone and spirit, ‘About Sasha’ is genuine teen fiction. And a very good one. Although it is not the first to put an intersex person at the center (there we have ‘Faking It’), the series is concerned with letting go by the contradictions of its protagonistsfor their impulses and even for the toxicities within the group of friends.
Those neither with you nor without you, those fights, humiliations, tell and tell executed in a fairly solvent manner by its cast, especially Saul Benchetrit like Pauline, Sasha’s sister or Paola Locatelliwho plays Anna the, so to speak, queen bee.
It is in its second half where this miniseries it gets kind of frustrating. On the one hand, because there is an apparent lack of internal logic in how the plots develop and resolve (if they do). It is one thing for there to be a certain interest in showing and addressing the adolescent as something as innocent as it is volatile, and quite another to not delve into their outbursts and impulses.
This is seen very clearly when the different turns are produced. The problem is not, so to speak, their predictability but rather how paradoxically forced they are. Let me explain: we all know that, for example, at some point what Sasha has been hiding throughout the series will come to light. The problem is more how it is executed (even why) than the twist itself.
Skating into the conclusion
Both in those moments and at the time of closing the miniseries, I think that Yaël Langmann he has not known how to handle the elements. The feeling would be that she wanted to tell many more things but she has run out of footage to do so, except that the last episode has a quarter of an hour (out of a total of 20 minutes) of the protagonist’s speech on intersex.
Again, it’s an ill-advised decision not for the idea itself but for its execution. Although we could argue that it does not differ from other proposals around powerful themes or fiction/complaint proposals, very little remains organic. Suddenly it goes from being an interesting series to discuss (which it is) to becoming another video for the sexual affective education class.
This seemingly constant fight between good and genuine intentions and its somewhat crude execution makes ‘About Sasha’ I slack just reaching the finish line. Which makes it slightly spoil the viewing of a miniseries that, in general terms, results from mandatory viewing. Interesting, with things to tell, but out of tune expository.
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