In classical theatre, anagnorisis, stemming from gignosko (to gain knowledge) and anà (back), is an important moment, found in plays like Aeschylus’ Choephoroi, Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex and Shakespeare’s King Lear. In this moment, two long-separated characters who would not know each other’s appearance anymore recognise each other by a small detail; typically, a scar.
A scar is the first frame shown in the newly released Girls & Boys (Donncha Gilmore, 2025), branching up Charlie’s (Liath Hannon) hand irregularly in three lines – healed, but not quite faded. She is sitting in a library when her tranquillity is interrupted by the arrival of a boy. ‘Sorry, is that seat free?’ Jason (Adam Lunnon-Collery) asks her. We do not see his face, just his hand. It has a peculiar scar, strikingly similar to Charlie’s. He sits down next to her, but she, seeming distressed, abruptly gets up and leaves. Only then is his face revealed. Two minutes into the film, the main characters mirror each other; in their hands, scars, and finally, faces. The first ten frames encapsulate the whole movie: two people may not recognise each other, but their bodies bear the signs of a shared past that they cannot escape.
Girls & Boys plays around the theme of recognition. The spectator follows the unravelling of anagnorisis through the eyes of Jason: everything around him, in the plot, the soundtrack, and the framing, seems to point a neon sign at Charlie’s head. But Jason is unable to see it since he does not recognise Charlie post her transition. Jason first strikes up a conversation with Charlie after seeing her camera, having also made short films as a kid. In one of their initial chats, Charlie slips and calls him Jace – a surprisingly familiar nickname for someone she has only known for a few minutes. When Charlie straightforwardly asks about Jason’s scar, he forgets the species of the jellyfish that caused it, which she swiftly fills in. These hints of recognition show that, for Charlie and Jason, there are pieces of them both in each other’s memories.
The soundtrack is also a giveaway. As both characters prepare for a party, a mixture of their faces appear in a sequence of frames while the music sings: ‘But I don’t recognise you’. Later, the song playing in the videos taken by them across Dublin on the nocturnal escapade has the lyrics ‘if I was someone else’.
Jason does not take any of the hints about his past with Charlie thrown at him throughout the movie, seeming not to understand, even when she yells it in his face. Only when he sees an old Polaroid of his and Charlie’s scarred arms latched together does he realise that they previously knew each other. Their scars are not only matching, but also complementary. They are reminders of their own individual pasts, but also physically unerasable signs that there was once another person who was physically and painfully tied to them.
In Homer’s ancient Greek epic, The Odyssey, the hero Odysseus was first mistaken for a beggar upon his return to his homeland of Ithaca. Many years had passed since anyone had seen him, and the Trojan War had changed his appearance. He was only recognised by his elderly nurse Eurycleia, who had seen him grow up since he was a baby, and only due to a scar on Odysseus’ leg. Similarly, in Euripides’ tragedy Electra, the eponymous daughter of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, recognised her brother Orestes, whom she knew to be dead, fundamentally by the scar on his forehead. Anagnorisis is a trope as old as time; nevertheless, it still left me shocked, mouth gaping open in my seat, when I went to see Gilmore’s film.
Girls & Boys employs dramatic anagnorisis extremely well. True, Jason would not have recognised Charlie’s face after her transition, and Charlie might have been dubious of Jason, but after they saw each other’s scars, there was no going back. Their recognition reminds us of an age-old truth: a scar represents a past, which might haunt us and hurt us. But it’s also what ultimately brings us back home. Scars are loudspeakers of our stories. Unlike tattoos, we cannot choose what to get, in what shape, in which place, and sometimes, we cannot even erase them. They have unusual shapes and could be telling a story we would rather keep to ourselves. I have a scar on my forehead from when I bumped my head into a wall when I was one. I am pretentious enough to see it as a metaphor; I don’t remember the scar’s story, but she tells my story to me.
