Transfixed

Bo Ancclin, 20-year-old transvestite, swings between Maeva, a West Indian transsexual, and streetwalking in Brussels, all the while acting on her desire for handsome Johnny, whose sole response is to insult and humiliate her. In her quest to find this strange young man’s weak point, she soon discovers that Johnny oscillates like she does between two schizophrenic identities. While an investigation leads Huysmans, a worn out cop, to take an interest in Bo, for whom he can’t help feeling esteem, a serial killer unleashes his violence on the prostitutes. Pryzuski, a humane cop, follows the case and is in turn interested in Bo, although we not sure if it’s because he needs her for the case or for himself. An attack puts him out of action and Huysmans takes over the case again which is soon made more complicated by Maeva’s murder. Bo’s friendship with Maeva incites her to carry out her own inquiry, assisted by Maeva’s old neighbor, Louisette, who saw what no one was meant to see and who’ll die because of it. Pryzuski soon follows, killed in his hospital bed. All of them had an inkling of the truth, but were they on the same track? After the serial killer or his imitator? When Bo finds herself face to face with the murderer, she realizes it’s Johnny and, acting on her feelings of love, offers herself up as an expiatory victim. However Huysmans intervenes, kills Johnny, thereby closing the case: Johnny is blamed for all the unsolved murders. Whereas Bo has caught on that the murders of Pryzuski, Maeva and Louisette are part of a macabre plot to save a rotten cop from being exposed. Bo’s love for Johnny even prevails after death and enables her to unmask Huysmans; the final truth, born in blood some twenty years earlier, connecting the cop and Johnny, rises to the surface.