Available on DVD: “Tomboy”

In Tomboy, a 10-year-old girl moves with her family to a suburb, and on her first day out of the house, another little girl asks her name. "Mikael," she says, and for the next couple of weeks, everyone thinks that she’s a boy. She plays boys’ games, gets into fights and even finds herself attracting, in a proto-sexual sort of way, the admiration of other girls. From there, things get complicated.

Tomboy is the second feature from Celine Sciamma, whose first film, Water Lilies, dealt with the burgeoning sexual feelings of a 15-year-old girl. The movie was so sly and subtle that you could watch the whole thing and not realize until well into the movie that the girl was a lesbian, though everything about her sexuality had been skillfully planted by the director.

You probably don’t need to have seen Water Lilies to catch the lesbian undercurrent in Tomboy. Less subtle than its predecessor, Tomboy is like a pint-size Boys Don’t Cry, and as such, it’s practically unique. When young Laure/Mikael (Zoe Heran) is asked why she lied, she doesn’t answer. She can’t answer, because she knows she can’t say it out loud. But two things are certain: She does not pretend to be a boy just for the sake of climbing trees, and this is not a phase that she is going to be growing out of.

On the contrary, she is growing into this, and so to see Tomboy is to see something that movies have rarely, if ever, depicted: What is it like to be a gay child? This is the true subject of Tomboy. Having depicted lesbianism in the early sexual years, Sciamma has wound back the clock to childhood to show us, with taste and sensitivity, something we have not seen.

Either through felicitous casting or something in Sciamma’s direction, Zoe Heran as the title character brings a wonderful contained quality to the role, the dignity of someone who can keep her own secrets.

The world of the children looks tribal, borderline dangerous; the world of the parents is placid and kindly in comparison. The relationships all feel lived-in and authentic, possibly because Sciamma was smart and decided to film Tomboy in Heran’s own neighborhood and use her own friends in the cast.

Anyway, chalk another one up. Sciamma is two for two.