Very likely I am not alone in thinking of Lesbian culture as sadomasochistic: our most popular plots revel in the kind of pain that requires frequent activation. Number one pain is the closet, the other is the very unfair but factual inability of two women to conceive children with each other, and then there’s the problem of New Relationship Energy for the serial-monogamish Lesbian. Finally, there’s the humiliation of Lesbian adolescence.
The following is sampling of the above topics as they played out in a summer of movie watching.
That Scary, Sexy Closet
Blue Jean (UK, 2023) directed by Georgia Oakley
I’ve discussed the lure of the past in previous installments of this newsletter. Blue Jean (2023) is a prime example of fear/terror functioning as an aphrodisiac, albeit unintentionally. Homosexual storylines particularly benefit from historical settings, most explicitly 20th century settings. There’s not only the basic thrill of re-evaluating history (the typical joy of finding representation, seeing yourself in the past, etc), but an inherent narrative benefit: queers in the past are hidden and repressed, and what makes a story if not mystery and repression? A 20th century setting allows Lesbians a heroic arc into self-acceptance.
Such is the lot of the spectacle of self-sabotage that is Blue Jean—told in desaturated, shivering images with the color temperature of an ice cube—in which a high school sports teacher named Jean (Rosy McEwen) struggles to live as a gay woman under Margaret Thatcher’s Section 28. McEwen’s performance is really what makes the film worthwhile: she plays Jean’s accelerating neurosis with a cool ethereal beauty. Her gaze, the center of the film, is cold and stunning, at once opaque and yet trapped in the total chaos underneath. When Jean bleaches her hair and dons a trench coat for a foray into a dyke nightclub, you might for a hopeful moment think you are about to enter the world of a fantastical 80s erotic thriller, something a little like The Hunger (1983). Unfortunately, it is not so. Like its titular character’s occupation, the movie’s singular quest is pedagogical.
Lesbian life, we learn, is enough of a thriller. If only! Blue Jean is insistent at once in creating a film that looks like the 80s and ends up feeling very much like a contemporary film explaining our contemporary problems. Few things could be a worse downer than a growing unease about anti-LGBTQ+ legislation, plus an incoming societal backlash (and maybe some in-group fighting?), than also being taught a PSA by a movie you thought could be cool.
Blue Jean picks up steam when we see Jean gaze on in panic as one of her own students wanders into the local lesbian bar. As her icy doe eyes track her student’s every movement, the movie accidentally leaves us ignorant of the actual source of Jean’s terror: is she paranoid her student might know about her, out her? Or, and this subtext the film seems anxious to make too ambiguous, is Jean perhaps unconsciously too interested in her student?
In contrast to the student-teacher relationship, Jean’s radically out, dykey girlfriend comes across as a little vanilla and, despite their explicit, pierced-and-tatted bodies-exposing sex scenes, not actually interesting. It was the situation with the cruel teacher as an anti-hero, as a kind of vampiric force, that attracted me the most to Blue Jean. Instead, Jean is constantly on alert out of stress, her eye movements frenzied and avoidant as she wanders the changing rooms of the teenage girls she teaches. Oddly, Jean keeps putting herself in suspicious situations: dragging the student into a bathroom stall at the dyke bar, for instance, but not to seduce the student rather than warn her to stay away. Glowering exchanges are cast between teacher and student, with the student holding an upper hand over fearful, doe-eyed, brink-of-tears Jean.
The movie tries to be clear about Jean’s goodness, which I found unfortunate. Some of the most sadistic teachers I have known in life were Lesbians—in my final year of high-school equivalent institution, for instance, one of these teachers orchestrated a campaign to expel me (she was successful, and as a result I still happen to find the profession of teaching slightly suspect). Jean, too, manages to have her Lesbian student expelled. Faced with her comeuppance, Jean pursues forgiveness from the student whose life is ruined. This of course Jean is implausibly granted, as we the audience know Jean is only a victim herself. I wish Blue Jean had allowed itself to be a little more nuanced here and not too anxious to treat Jean as a victim—even her anti-heroic behavior is forgiven by way of her victim status. It might have felt more triumphant to see Lesbian anti-hero, and a badly-behaving teacher. But I guess each era of history gets the kind of Lesbian movies it deserves.
Hurts so good! (Homosexuality, Pregnancy, and Romantic Triangles)
Les cinq diables/The Five Devils (France, 2022) directed by Léa Mysius
Passages (USA/France, 2023) directed by Ira Sachs
Roter Himmel/Afire (Germany, 2023) directed by Christian Petzold
La amiga de mi amiga/Girlfriends and Girlfriends (Spain, 2022) directed by Zaida Carmona
Birth/Rebirth (USA, 2023) directed by Laura Moss
Meanwhile, Ira Sachs’ Passages (2023) hit the summer screens in New York City. I watched it within a week or so of Christian Petzold’s Afire (2023), another movie that both irritated and delighted me, as it shows a kind of Continental easiness—maybe even carelessness—around love, loss, and creativity that suddenly seems totally alien to the culture of the United States. Both movies offer a prime example of, as a dear friend put it, “the superiority of cinema over all other art forms.” Poems can be uttered on film in a way words on pages only dream of reproducing, songs can be sung with a squeak and a whisper and break your heart. And then there’s the romance: without the existential dread that waits beyond the hustle of full-time employment, pricey healthcare, and hard-won stability, Germans, French, and British people, these movies tell us, can hang out, make soup and lasagne, and take their time with their art, all while nuking their adult relationships and behaving at their most emotionally immature (in this analogy, Afire is the more hopeful film, although it does very openly anticipate the Anthropocene).
Sachs’ tight little story of a toxic love triangle between a gay male couple and a young woman does not overtly make a “Lesbian movie,” but Adèle Exarchopoulos’ character, “Agathe,” appears as if she were a continuation of “Adèle” from the famous La vie d’Adèle Chapitres 1 & 2 aka Blue is the Warmest Color (2013). Agathe, like Adèle, is an elementary-school teacher, and she refers to her childhood as working class—a key premise in Blue is the Warmest Color, which in itself is less of a “Lesbian movie” than an observation of social strata. If one so wishes, one might imagine Exarchopoulos’ character’s appearance in Passages as telling another chapter from Adèle’s life (Chapters 3 & 4, say), one of a slightly more mature version of Adèle who might entertain having her own child and what her familial circumstances might look like: perhaps, she might choose as the father of her child a gay man. Apart from Agathe’s tryst with Franz Ragowski, who as the central character takes up all the time and space of the film, we never fully learn as much as we’d like to know about Agathe’s past and future. Sexual orientation, its fixedness or fluidity, and what it says about in humans, seems to culminate in the fabrication of children: gay or straight, conception will always have a sexual significance. What I loved about Passages was how much it acknowledged that for Gays and Lesbians, the creation of a family inevitably creates triangles, some more visible or ghostly than others.
Parallel to her appearances this year in Léa Mysius’ Five Devils and Ira Sachs’ Passages, Mubi has been hosting a slight retrospective of Adele Exarchopoulos’ films. We are an unbelievable ten years into Exarchopoulos’ career, which of course started with the unforgettable Blue is the Warmest Color (2013)—an iconic moment for Lesbian cinema, regardless of what you think of the film (which still seems to divide the Lesbian public). The retrospective allows us to see two more bizarre pieces of filmmaking, Sybil (2019) directed by Justine Triet (also starring the stunning Virginie Elfira, of Paul Verhoeven’s Benedetta, 2021), and Orphelin (2016), both of which are truly misshapen movies and lie in close proximity to Lesbian cinema/interest. Since both were extremely awful, I won’t be able to discuss them here (except to say that in the latter movie, Adèle Exarchopoulos inexplicably plays a younger version of Adèle Haenel, of Portrait of a Lady on Fire, 2019, and that both Adèle’s’ lover in the film is played by Gemma Arterton).
While the camera of Passages hones in on the faces of his characters and the interiors of their lives, tying us tightly to the intimate drama of the characters’ intrigues and never granting us a view of the sky, The Five Devils is expansive and eerily unusual, with wide vistas of mountains, lakes, forests, and suburban domiciles. Its protagonist is a little girl with superpowers—a strong sense of smell that grants the ability to travel through time—who discovers the secret behind her parents’ marriage: a love triangle between her mother (Exarchopolous), her father (Moustapha Mbengue) and the father’s sister—a mysterious aunt (Swala Emati) whose arrival in the film heralds its proximity to the eerie, uncanny, and queer. With such dire emotional constraint, the plot reminded me of a work of Lesbian pulp fiction by Marion Zimmer Bradley in which a Lesbian is unhappily in love with her pregnant sister-in-law, which is essentially the story Five Devils tells but does not show. As far as sadism goes, you can’t treat protagonists to any greater romantic distress than such a triangle. Five Devils culminates in a sadistic and totally fanciful twist, and Exarchopolous plays the lovelorn mother with such poignancy and melodrama, her performance makes up for a logically not entirely sound film.
Another upsetting and fun spin on women as co-parents—specifically, co-fabricators—of children appeared in this summer’s Bronx-based horror movie Birth/Rebirth (2023): here a nurse loses her daughter, only to have a bleary-eyed morgue technician re-animate the little girl. To be clear, Birth/Rebirth was not “technically” a Lesbian movie (the women’s sexuality is never clarified, but it isn’t explicitly hetero either) and it is disturbing, almost grueling to watch, with heavy-handed acting. But it is not dumb, and despite a grainy realist look avoids all the trappings of moralizing or preaching. I was astonished by the weird little details that spilled beyond the actual ambitions of this “new spin on Frankenstein,” which draws its horror from deep within the idea of a synthetically-manufactured child-bearing and child-rearing.
Speaking of Baby Fever: On the tailend of the incisive cultural moment that was the reality show The Ultimatum: Queer Love, a delightful Spanish satire fittingly showed up on Mubi. Though less tortured than Passages, Girlfriends and Girlfriends (2022) also languishes (lightheartedly!) in toxicity and the fun of bad behavior. Zaida Carmona directs and stars as a character named after herself, with a cast of rotating women playing romantic musical chairs. Given this all-Lesbian ensemble, the humor is self-deprecating—here, there is obviously no danger of any character contracting the ultimate, life and psychology-altering STI that is pregnancy. The humor of the film speaks of cultures and customs that I find as alienating as they are true, and apparently transcultural: the currency of NRE (new relationship energy), the capacity for drama, the desirability of monogamy and chaotic affairs. There’s a coy allusion to Eric Rohmer’s movies both in the film’s 4:3 aspect ratio, but also in the characters’ compulsively watching, debating, or hating on Rohmer movies. But unlike Rohmer movies, the campy, self-directed satire had the kind of earnest affectedness we know from Almodóvar. My favorite detail was a married Lesbian couple, the only stagnant pairing, marked because they had the same exact bowl-cut and same-exact style of clothing, having fulfilled their “urge to merge.”
Adolescent Lesbian Assholes
Four Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle/Quatre aventures de Reinette et Mirabelle (France, 1987) directed by Éric Rohmer
Bottoms (USA, 2023) directed by Emma Seligman
Just as silly and delightful, Metrograph’s streaming series this summer showcased another “Summer of Rohmer” which included the gem-like Four Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle (1987), about two very different young women who strike up a fast, easy friendship in the lush countryside and later Paris. Their conversations are at times combative, supportive, loopy, and bratty. Romantic attraction between the two young women is not discussed, but Mirabelle, who is the more fanciful and opinionated of the pair, paints elaborate portraits of naked women in erotic positions. “That’s the most beautiful view of a woman,” she muses about a figure with enormous buttocks.
Which brings me to Bottoms (2023). Walking to the movies a few weeks ago, I spotted Lesbians roaming in every direction: dykey Lesbians, inconspicuous Lesbians, mulletted Lesbians, young, old, and medium Lesbians, you get the picture—they’d all just either seen the film or were heading to it. This was, similar to Barbenheimer, cinema as an event. Probably every one of these Lesbians had already seen Seligman’s previous feature Shiva Baby (2020), which I thought was just fine. But at this point, I was grateful for Bottoms regardless, simply because seeing movie-watching manifest in the real world has become a rare delight. And then, you know what? I really enjoyed Bottoms. Unlike most art, Seligman’s whacky humor benefits from its broader canvas, in which we get an intentionally obtuse and surreal take on the palette of the High School Comedy. Pain and humiliation are taken to the next level—girls literally smash each other in the face—blending with the completely unattainable (the movie’s romantic pairings are implausible, the amount of hot girls in the movie who turn gay is implausible, but that’s the point). A few weeks prior, I had caught The Hairy Bird/All I Wanna Do (1998) and Dick (1999) at Metrograph’s lovingly curated Kirsten Dunst Retrospective, recalling the times I had spent in my early teens in a Kirsten-Dunst addled haze, doting over the way Kirsten Dunst looked at other girls in Bring it On (2000). I was struck by the raunchiness—or more clearly: the awareness of sex—of these films, especially in The Hairy Bird. This kind of awareness thankfully does also run throughout Bottoms—although paradoxically, Bottoms seems a little more ick-ed about showing sex (and not just talking about it) than it is by its own gnarly depictions of violence. Such is the paradox of the High School Comedy, American cinema’s most political subversive genre that simultaneously fortifies and dictates the culture’s monotone normativity.
Final Notes
All-time classic The Watermelon Woman (1996), the perhaps most Lesbian of all Lesbian movies, was released in a beautiful blu-ray-edition this summer and is up on Criterion Channel with plenty supplemental material.
Will Anthology Film Archives’ intriguing Narrow Rooms series—celebrating the “stranger, darker, and more exhilarating films that often fall through the cracks”(!)—include any obscure Lesbian features? I’ll wait and see, but I am excited about these movies.
Mutt (2023)—starring a trans actor as a gay trans man who gets to be both heroic and annoying— is screening one last time tomorrow (Thursday) night at Film Forum.
My Animal (2023), a new Lesbian Werewolf movie, has been screening all week on a 4:00pm slot, a wonderful hour for normie 9-to-6 Lesbians like me to miss.
This week, the Erotic Thrillers series of Karina Longworth’s iconic You Must Remember This podcast is finally focusing on lesbians—with an episode on The Wild Side (1995), which I have yet to see, and Bound (1996), which most of us have seen more times than we can count.