Fridae

19th-century Dublin. In an Ireland stricken by waves of potato blight, disease outbreaks, and depopulation, an unmarried woman with no means or patron would have to live a brief life of poverty, misery, and indignity.

Glenn Close plays Albert Nobbs, a biological woman who made the decision to live a life as a man for so long, she has forgotten her birth name. Yet it is a small price to pay. Thirty years of serving and waiting at tables for the rich has allowed Albert Nobbs to live without want or fear. He might even afford to buy a shop at the corner and retire as a respectable tobacconist, petite bourgeois shopkeeper. Yet a chance meeting with a handsome transsexual man (played by Janet McTeer) turns Albert's world upside down...

Based on a novella by George Moore which was adapted into a stage prodction in the 1980s that won Glenn Close an Obie award, Close's screen adaptation of Albert Nobbs is a labour of love whose artistry has been refined over the long years it took to get produced. Much bleaker than the comic tone of the original novella or the stage production, the film is a silent tragedy that plays like The Remains of the Day, except with a frozen, mincing Glenn Close in drag instead of an immaculately asexual Anthony Hopkins.

Close finds the simultaneous triumph and tragedy of the title character in the instant where the clothes become the man, where the performance becomes the lived reality. Inspired by his discovery of a fellow transsexual who is happily married with a loving wife, the honourable Albert Nobbs decides to complete his life by courting a two-timing ditzy hotel maid Helen (Mia Wasikowska), completely unaware of what Helen really wants or what girls really want.

As a film, Albert Nobbs is singular, unforgettable, and lyrical. It is no wonder then that both Glenn Close and Janet McTeer should be nominated for Oscars this year, and I bet you this will be a classic in the LGBT film canon in time to come.