Tootsie

Following unsuccessful attempts to secure an acting engagement, the desperate Michael (Dustin Hoffman) attends an audition for a role in a soap opera dressed as a woman. His alter ego unexpectedly becomes a TV star and an inspiration to millions of American women. The situation grows complicated when he falls in love with a female co-star (Jessica Lange). In the background, there’s New York, a city of aspiring actors and money-grubbing agents, smoky audition rooms, TV sets, industry parties, and off-Broadway stages. In the cramped interiors, protagonists exchange vicious taunts and witty retorts. After all, Elaine May was responsible for the revised script and Larry Gelbart, creator of the M*A*S*H* TV series, for its final version. Under the guise of comedy, romance and satire, Pollack’s masterpiece smuggles in observations about sexism in the Reagan era. Tootsie is a classic of cinematic cross-dressing, a film that to this day provokes the following question: could a man ever serve as the midwife of feminism?

Bogna Goślińska

Sydney Pollack (1934–2008) was an American director who specialized in dramas and thrillers, with Tootsie being the only full-fledged comedy he made. His other notable films include They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (1969), The Way We Were (1973) and Out of Africa (1985), for which he won two Oscars (as director and producer). He was also an actor and appeared mainly in small parts, including a role in Tootsie.

4K restoration from 2014.