I wish I could know if it touches others as deeply as it touched me.

I had the same feeling, seeing it, that I did when I read Whitman and Emily Dickenson for the first time: that I had come Home, that these people spoke not only to me, but for me.

And though I never went as far out as Ludovic, the seven year old child in this film -- who wants to be a girl, some part of me, stopped as he was not, remains.

But to the story: Ludovic and his two brothers live in a model and very average Belgian household, his father just getting settled into a new job until --Ludovic, dressed as a girl, starts play-acting marrying Jerome, the boss's son.

Lots of trouble, which ends with the father losing his job and moving to another town.

The boy has one ally. His grandmother (maternal) a woman who has, magically, never abandoned her dreams and won't let her grandson (this particular peculiar one) be squashed.

The film sounds like a Problem film but it is more: a testament to the enchantment of childhood, and the beauty of The Feminine. The film is a symphony of color, going from the bright colors of children's nursery blocks to the pinks and blues of a nymph's boudoir and around it all a magical world that children half-live in which they can fly and see us, and themselves, from a height.

Most delicate and delicious: the animation which gives life to what seems to be on Belgium TV a Ken-and-Barbie duo.

The film is not about the making of a transsexual or homosexual. It is about the Rightness, the absolute Rightness in a child's instincts.

Child "experts" tell us we must quash a child's opposite sex identities.

This film, this wonderful film, differs.

Note: be prepared for a happy "ending" which is going to surprise and delight you.

Credits due here: the part of Ludovic the seven-year-old changeling is done by George Du Fresne. His father Pierre: Jean- Philippe Ecoffey; his mother Hannah: Michele Laroque and--hats off! hands together, his wonderful grandmother, Elisabeth (sic): Helene Vincent. Director: Alain Berliner. Script: Chris vander Stappen and Alain Berliner. The special effects where the mannequins move: Spara.

In the Symposium, Plato speculates that the men attracted to men are double-men (i.e. onetime two men joined before the Split) and likewise the women who love women. But I think we are all men--women and am sorry, very, that we cannot live-out all of our selves.

My brother, when I was a child, tried hard to get me to learn baseball. I wish the censors that surround him would lower their guard and I could hear his real thoughts when he sees this film and remembers the effeminate brother who he wanted, very much, to be one of the boys.

I was never to be that.

And now, briefly, in the dark of a theater, doting on this film, which speaks to and for me, I glimpse what I saw long ago, the heaven in the Feminine.

Hint to our Lesbian readers. Wait for the movie's end. Something for everyone here.

Viewers outside the major cities with their art-house circuit may have to wait to see Ma Vie En Rose on videotape. But it's worth the wait.