But, what would be the theme within the theme?
Last year I concocted one on the go, as I watched two movies featuring gay men and two movies featuring gay women, one of each set in more or less modern times and one of each set more than 100 years ago.
This year, I toyed with a couple different ideas. The first was to rewatch some of my favorite movies with gay-themed subject matter, but the first few choices I looked at were things I felt I had seen relatively recently, so I moved on from that idea pretty quickly. (Though, I reserve the right to return to it in 2025 and beyond.)
As I was searching the various streaming services for inspiration, I came across a few titles I was familiar with, which is definitely how I went with the theme last year. All four of the movies I watched last year were already on my radar as things I thought I should have already made time for.
So as I was finding a bunch of titles I'd never heard of this year, I decided to go in the opposite direction and watch four movies that were -- or had the potential to be -- real discoveries.
Of course, this also created the opportunity for them not to be very good. Fortunately, the first one out of the gate cleared the bar rather easily.
As my first film, I decided to go with an 82-minute movie on Netflix with the whimsical title you see above: Ellie & Abbie (and Ellie's Dead Aunt). I'm not sure whether the "and" or the ampersand is really correct, because I've seen it both ways online. So I am going for a mixture of ands and ampersands.
The length was right for the night my sister left after her two-week visit, when I had understandably accumulated my fair share of exhaustion, and the title promised frivolity that would go down relatively easily.
I didn't realize until I started watching it that it was Australian, and that it would be so much more appropriate for Pride Month than the plot synopsis suggested.
That synopsis is basically this: Teenager Ellie (Sophie Hawkshaw) has a crush on teenager Abbie (Zoe Terakes), so she is trying to muster up the courage to ask Abbie to the school formal (the equivalent of the prom in the U.S.). This involves coming out rather casually to her mother (Marta Dusseldorp). As she's trying to psych herself up, she is visited by the spirit of her dead aunt Tara (Julia Billington), who doesn't consider herself so much a ghost as Ellie's fairy godmother -- and she emphasizes the word "fairy." The real draw for me may have been Kiwi actress Rachel House, who I saw from the Netflix thumbnail appeared in a supporting role.
So just a goofy existential lesbian comedy with fairly low stakes beyond the central sexual coming of age themes, right?
Not so much. Oh it is that for much of the time, but it turns out -- and this is a little bit of a spoiler, but not one that would ruin the movie for you -- that Tara died after a gay pride rally 30 years earlier, when a car full of villainous cretins who were never caught ran her over with their car.
As Ellie and the spirit both come to grips with that -- Ellie was never told by her mother what happened, and Tara's memory of what happened is a bit foggy for understandable reasons -- the film packs an emotional punch that I was never expecting from that title. And speaks perfectly to what members of the LGBTQI+ community deal with on an everyday basis, both the "little" things (like trying to decide if your crush is actually gay, let alone returns your affections) and the far bigger things (like the violence of intolerant people, which can sometimes be fatal).
Monica Zanetti's film shows its modest means at certain points, but it really delivers on big themes in this economical package, and is underpinned by good performances. Another name I recognized in the cast was Zoe Terakes, but at first I could not figure out how I knew her. It turns out she made an animated short film I saw a couple years ago called Are You Still Watching?, which was an answer to both COVID and the sexual fantasies of lesbians like her locked in their houses. It's a great little seven minutes of adult-themed and subversive animation -- another film that packs a lot into its brevity.
I was tempted to give Ellie & Abbie 3.5 stars, but just now as I am typing this, only a few minutes after finishing it, I've decided to go for a full four. It's chock full of everything you could want from this sort of movie, alternating between lighter and heavier fare in a way most films cannot pull off -- especially for a filmmaker directing her first feature and writing only her second feature-length script.
Let's hope in the second week of Pride Month, the next of the dozen previously unknown movies, which I've just added to my watchlist on various streaming services, will be half as good.
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