Pride Month: The Danish Girl

Ten years is not much time in the real world, but in the case of our public conversations about the trans experience and its responsible portrayal on film, it feels like an eternity.

My memory of the exact timelines here is a bit fuzzy, probably because I was not personally affected by this discourse. But I don't think ten years ago, we had yet determined that there was something less than ideal about a trans character being played by a cisgender actor. In fact, ten years ago, most of us might not even have known what "cisgender" meant.

Ten years ago, in 2015, was when The Danish Girl came out. This was my final of four weekly viewings for Pride Month, the movie I had previously mentioned as a blind spot for me, especially considering my exhaustive coverage of films of a certain prominence from this period. I mean, The Danish Girl won an Oscar, for Alicia Vikander. I think a timing issue prevented me from seeing it in the year it came out -- yes, IMDB tells me it was released on January 21, 2016 in Australia, which would have been a week after that year's ranking deadline. And I didn't prioritize seeing it once it was no longer urgent to rank it. 

I'm going to get to telling you my thoughts on the film and some contemplations of what has changed in those ten years, but first I have to give you the baggage I brought into The Danish Girl, some of which I would have had at the time, some of which I've acquired since. As you may have detected, this is leading up to a somewhat sour finish to Pride Month, but hey -- you can't love every movie, even with subject matter as important as this.

Here's that baggage:

1) I have always had an issue with Eddie Redmayne. I don't know what it is, I just feel a bit unnerved by him. Those qualities may actually serve him to some degree in a movie about a person who feels uncomfortable in their own skin, but on practical terms, it keeps me at a distance. The only times I've really liked him on screen were in the Fantastic Beasts movies. That's not to say I don't think he's talented, just that his particular talents don't really work on me because of the way he unnerves me.

2) Tom Hooper, the director, has subsequently proven himself to be a bit of a hack. I think we all were on board with The King's Speech, the best picture winner, but I really disliked his Les Miserables (which also won an Oscar for supporting actress), and then his version of Cats was a cultural laughingstock. There's an excessive earnestness mixed with melodrama in these last two. After seeing The Danish Girl, I'm convinced this just characterizes him on the whole.

Both of these two contribute to why The Danish Girl did not work for me, but let's start with Redmayne.

Ten years ago, it was still okay for Redmayne to play this role. The way the conversation about representation has shifted has been both a positive development, and a potentially limiting one. Although it is now generally acknowledged that a trans performer should play a trans character, the reality is, there are not many trans performers who are also certified box office draws. Elliot Page can't play every trans role out there, especially since that would only cover trans men. While this does make for potentially greater representation among actors -- the most prominent three trans movies last year, Emilia Perez, The People's Joker and Will & Harper, all had trans actors playing trans characters, or playing themselves -- the flip side of that is that Hollywood may have just shied away from telling new trans stories, because they want the bankable stars but don't want to ruffle feathers.

The fact that Redmayne should no longer play this role is not fatal to the fortunes of The Danish Girl, because there's no question that he approaches the material sensitively (perhaps too sensitively, more on that in a minute). But it is hard to watch it in 2025 and not think about this. 

When I think about this issue of who can play whom, I think about the backlash against Scarlett Johansson when she agreed to play a trans character and then ultimately backed out of that role after the internet blew up. That was in 2018. So in 2015, we were still three years away from this being talked about popularly, if I am indeed right that this was a watershed moment in this discussion. It's interesting to think about how recent this whole discussion is, and how much we've grown up, collectively, in such a short amount of time.

So yeah, it was okay for Redmayne to play Lili Elbe, born Einer Wegener, in 2015. Do I think his performance is good? Not really. 

Once I started noticing Redmayne's go-to trick in the role, I couldn't top noticing it, since he kept on doing it. His big emotional transition over 15 to 30 seconds, which he does maybe a half-dozen times, is to start out looking scared or unsure, then get a faraway look in his eyes, then resolve his features into a bashful grin. The first time, it's interesting. Soon after, it's a crutch.

The fact that both he and Vikander spend most of this movie in a sort of foggy haze of tears, forever on the verge of crying or having just cried, is, in many ways, appropriate to the subject matter. This is emotional subject matter and it is serious subject matter. But as directed by Hooper, it feels constantly turned up to 11. I think Hooper's only mode is to shout at us.

I should probably tell you a little more what that subject matter is, if you don't know.

The real Einer Wegener was a citizen of Copenhagen in the year 1926, and married to his wife Gerda. (Every time they said her name, I thought they were saying Goethe, like the German writer.) They're both painters. He's a landscape artist, and she does portraits. (Until he becomes Lili, I'll use the pronoun "he" for the sake of clarity.) 

One day she asks him to stand in for a female model who couldn't be present, requiring him to wear a dress and fit into some dainty women's shoes. She couldn't have known he has a secret proclivity for this sort of thing, but that's the first place I thought this movie mis-stepped. Because we aren't given any clue about Einer's predilections -- is that a weighted word? -- at first we are left with the idea that he "became" trans as a result of seeing himself in women's clothing, rather than that this was, for him, a very weighted moment of flirtation with what he'd always wanted. We don't see that putting on these clothes is anything other than a lark for Einer, and then all the sudden -- at least that's how the movie makes it feel -- he has questions about his gender and his true self. 

Ten years ago, we may not even yet have been fully clear on the idea, as a society, that being trans is not a choice, not something that comes on suddenly, but a thing each person knows has been in them their entire lives. Surely, there's an innate effeminate quality to Redmayne that makes it easier to believe the character has always felt this way, and after the fact, he/she talks about it in those terms. But as first introduced, it seems like the character might have "caught" a "trans virus," and prior to modeling the women's clothing was just an ordinary husband with ordinary heterosexual hungers and images of self.

I also wondered at the responses of the medical community who meet with Einer, who rapidly is no longer appropriately referred to that way. In fact, let's switch over now to calling her Lili.

Although Lili does finally come across a sympathetic doctor, the ones she encounters before that are extreme caricatures. In fact, there's one that gets super annoyed at Gerda and says "Surely you must know that your husband is insane." Of course, a hundred years ago, "insane" was a very medically defensible term -- even 20 years ago it probably was. However, it does seem hard to imagine that a man of science has so little interest in possible schisms between the biological reality of one's body and the emotional reality of one's mind. Methinks The Danish Girl goes too far in the opposite direction of presenting these doctors as a bunch of quacks and idiots, almost to the point that it becomes slapstick -- which surely is not in keeping with the rest of the tone of the film. Oh and by the way, the doctor in question promptly terminates the interview with Gerda by walking away from her in disgust, another improbable response from a medical professional, even a medical professional from a century ago.

I will admit that as a person who has set aside a month to watch four trans films, I very much wanted each of the films I saw to be good. Only the first was very good, but that happens.

So it does pain me to deliver a negative verdict on The Danish Girl. But you are doing a far worse disservice to trans representation if you just rubber stamp everything as good because you want to lift up these themes and this representation. Certainly, the trans advocates who shat on Emilia Perez understand that. It's not just "any well-intentioned representation of trans people is good representation of trans people."

And the fact is, these praised performances -- Vikander's as well -- just aren't really award worthy, if you ask me. They and their director are giving us something so saturated in emotion that it becomes downright soggy with it. It's not an easy touch to underplay rather than overplay something, but the things that are underplayed almost always affect us the most, because their emotional potency sneaks up on us. The Danish Girl equates a constant dropping of shallow buzzwords about self-actualization, combined with a lot of tears and emotional intensity, with elevating a topic to its grandest form. But it shouldn't be easy to get this touch right, which is why some people are great filmmakers and some people are just mid.

If we are celebrating Pride Month on film, we should also be proud of the efforts of the filmmakers, and The Danish Girl just doesn't really get close enough. Lili Elbe's story was one that deserved to be told, it just should have been told better. 

That brings me to the end of another Pride Month celebration here on The Audient. I'm already thinking of the possible themes for 2026. 

Pride Month: Stay on Board: The Leo Baker Story

Stay on Board: The Leo Baker Story checked a number of boxes for me as my third weekly viewing of trans movies during Pride Month:

1) It's a documentary. Through ten Pride Month viewings over three years, I had yet to watch a documentary. 

2) It's about a trans man, which worked with my decision to watch two movies about trans men and two movies about trans women, alternating weekly.

3) It addresses a topic that is vital to trans athletes, which is where they fit in the gender-divided sports world which has fairly strict, though hopefully loosening, guidelines on who can compete against whom.

Leo Baker was born Lacey Baker, and the first thing I found noteworthy about Nicola B. Marsh and Giovanni Reda's 2022 documentary was how much it engages with Leo's dead name. In a narrative film, you can choose how much or how little to do that, and it may be a key component in what you're trying to explore with your theme. The characters don't have a choice, because the writer makes that decision for them.

When Leo chose to tell his story, he probably had some choice over how often Lacey was invoked. You can see it makes him visibly uncomfortable to speak too much about Lacey, though also that he knows this is part of telling his story in as honest and as complete a manner as possible. 

First Lacey, then Leo, is one of the great skateboarders for his age group, and during the setting of the film, is one of the athletes preparing for the debut of skateboarding during the 2020 (eventually 2021) Tokyo Olympics. However, his ascendancy has resulted in steadily becoming more masculine in his appearance, while still competing under the name Lacey, against other girls (he's a teenager), however reluctantly. In addition to society marking him as a certain gender, by convention, the world of competitive skateboarding has to mark him as a certain gender, by necessity -- especially since, as far as they know, he is indeed a woman.

But the dishonesty of continuing to compete under his dead name is having severe consequences on the young skateboarding prodigy, in addition to losing him some of his endorsements when he cuts his hair and starts shaving his head. The world seems to get that Leo is trans, even before he's told them.

The interesting thing about skateboarding is that it's one of those sports that seems like women and men can do equally well. You obviously would not want men and women in the same boxing ring, but the gender division of skateboarders is far more arbitrary. It relies more on fine motor skills than the brute strength that has traditionally justified the separation of men and women in competitive sports.

And though that exact arbitrary division isn't belabored in Stay on Board, it comes through clearly. If men and women were just assigned to compete against each other, which they really could in this case, how Leo defines himself as a trans man would not be relevant at all, and his upward trajectory might be less damaged. (Of course, I don't know that there's any Olympic sport where men and women compete against each other, so the Olympics, while apparently a boon for the skateboarding community, are actually a focused moment of challenge for Leo.)

Another thing I found interesting about Leo's story was his relationship with his girlfriend. I don't mind telling you that the sexual preferences of trans people is something I have questions about. If you are a trans man and you are dating a woman, are you better classifiable as a heterosexual trans man, a lesbian, or just something else entirely? The "something else entirely" is probably a good single encapsulation of what it means to be queer, especially trans.

But the effect of his transition on his girlfriend, who remains supportive, is an interesting one to note. She's obviously a lesbian and she got together with Leo when he still identified as a woman, though this is a bit blurry, because they reveal a conversation they had soon after meeting where the girlfriend asked him about his preferred pronouns. He started with a hurried "she/her is fine," before changing that answer to "he/him" the next day. (Though interestingly, some other interviewed subjects refer to Leo as "they/them," another indication of just what kind of spectrum this is.)

It seems evident, though, that the girlfriend (I should probably look up her name rather than continuing to refer to her as "the girlfriend") imagined she was falling in love with a person who was primarily a woman, at least physically if not emotionally. Leo saving money for his top surgery is acknowledged as a potential moment when they might have to consider breaking up, because the physical side may soon no longer be what the girlfriend wants. (That's my last reference to her and I never looked up her name, which is too bad because she's lovely, both physically and emotionally.)

Stay on Board is a little meandering in terms of its structure, and it barely ekes out a complete feature length at only 72 minutes. There's definitely some repeated material here. Generally, though, the film follows a satisfying forward momentum in Olympic preparations, and our checking in with Leo's mental state as he deals with the expected obstacles is poignant.

Okay, next week is my final Pride Month viewing for June, with a story about a trans woman that's one of the more prominent ones out there -- and potentially problematic in some ways. Stay tuned. 

Pride Month: Funeral Parade of Roses

When I decided to focus on trans movies for my four Pride Month viewings in June, I figured I'd be limiting myself to movies from the last 15 years, 20 at most. Anything before that likely would not engage earnestly with the trans experience, or if it tried to do so, might do so ignorantly.

But then over the weekend I was going through my watchlist on Kanopy and saw the title Funeral Parade of Roses, a 1969 movie that I'd added to my list at some point in the past year, only because I was intrigued by the title and what little I could see of it from the image on Kanopy -- a variation on the image you see here. Enough of a variation, I should add, that I had to click into the details to be sure it was a trans movie.

For sure it was, but here's one different from 56 years ago: Back then, the term "transvestite" was what got used. And that was fine, then, but we've since moved past that word, probably for the best.

In truth, "transvestite" only appears in the Kanopy description of the Toshio Matsumoto's movie, and presumably only then to meet it on the terms of the era in which it was made. It never appears in the movie itself.

Though a "funnier" (a.k.a. less enlightened) term does appear. As one part of this experimental film in which an unseen interviewer addresses various homosexual men in Tokyo of the day, he asks them how long they have been a "gay boy." They aren't offended by the term. It was 1969, and that homosexuality dared speak its name in public at all was something relatively new.

Before going into too much of the particulars of the film, such as I am able to synopsize them, I'll start with the feel of it. If the first movie I watched last week, Runs in the Family, were the feel-good, it'll-all-work-out-at-the-end-of-the-day trans movie, Funeral Parade of Roses is something far more existential and bleak and ultimately sort of hopeless.

I read the plot synopsis on Wikipedia just now to remind myself of some of the finer details -- it was pretty late last night when I plowed through the final 20 minutes -- and it does have a plot that can be laid out fairly clearly and succinctly. That was not my experience of watching it, though.

This is an arthouse film with a capital A. In fact, much of what's here is the sort of thing that would later be spoofed by people like Wayne and Garth, only they'd attribute the style to Eastern Europe rather than Matsumoto's Japan of 1969. All the arthouse hallmarks are here, from use of black and white, to the periodic harsh editing and insertion of images that bear no relationship to anything that's come before, to the use of discordant and ominous music, to the free-flowing general lack of a plot.

What plot there is surrounds Eddie, played by an actor known as Peter. Peter does not, apparently, consider himself a trans woman (he's still alive), but he's a gay icon of sorts in Japan, and there would be no question of his legitimacy to play this role. Remember, this is a different time -- pronouns might be she, but they might not be, and clearly this character is not assuming a full female identity in that she (let's go with "she") uses the name Eddie.

Anyway, Eddie is a dancer at a gay club and is involved in a rivalry with the club's madame, Leda (Osamu Ogasawara), both of whom are involved in a relationship with the club's manager, Gonda (Yoshio Tsuchiya) -- Eddie covertly, Leda overtly. Eddie also is friends with an arthouse filmmaker and the filmmaker's crew -- the scenes from his film are wild -- and they all do drugs and go about town. 

Subtextually, this is a film about self-loathing, fuelled by the perception of others loathing you. As has been the experience for transgender people in society who dare to show any of their tendencies, knowing that the largest percentage of people they come in contact with will show no willingness to accept them or even tolerate them. (Yes, there is a difference between those two terms. "Tolerance" is also, it strikes me, a term that has fallen out of favor, as it seems to indicate that this person has a power to tolerate or not tolerate someone. No bigot should have that power. They can mind their own fucking business and just let the trans person be.)

I kept writing down lines of dialogue that I thought made this movie seem really suited for Pride Month. Here was one:

"But gay boys have their own pride, don't you think so?"

And another:

"Each man will have their own mask, some they will wear their entire life."

And a third:

"If you love someone, their gender doesn't matter."

Matsumoto is confronting with his themes, mostly in a good way. There's a scene where Eddie walks through a gallery of various gruesome portraits of faces, but they're almost like more realistic versions of Picasso faces, with excess orifices in the wrong places, too many noses, that sort of thing. They are meant to serve as a hideous reflection of what Eddie thinks the world thinks of her. 

There's happiness in Eddie's world, to be sure, and a certain wonder to some of the scenes captured that belies these feelings of self-loathing. I am thinking specifically of a scene where the camera travels up a tower so high that I thought it must be the Eiffel Tower, if the Eiffel Tower were in Tokyo. The camera passes various beams and openings as it ascends, looking out over the city. There is a Man With a Movie Camera aspect of what this film captures that I appreciated.

But we always return, in no uncertain terms, to the loathing, especially in an ending whose significance I didn't understand until I read the plot synopsis. The final images of the film are a striking representation of the way a "transvestite" views him or herself, depending on what pronoun they wanted to use, but I didn't quite understand what had literally happened in the plot to get us to that point. I may have missed it due to sleepiness, but I think the occasionally abstruse presentation of the story meant that I might not have gotten it anyway.

I felt a fascination with this film, but I did not always think it was successful. I suppose that's kind of the idea behind an experimental film. It confronts you with feelings rather than always delivering on a coherent story, and by definition, the choices it makes will work better for some people than others. I guess I wished it had worked for me a little more often than it did.

Still, I feel like I've seen a seminal document from its time, which I now understand has a reputation as something of a masterwork. And certainly, I didn't imagine I'd see anything so forthright in its depiction of these issues made at a time before I was even born. 

I hope it's "gotten better" for trans people since 1969, but I fear it may not have -- not by the margin we would hope, and certainly not in Trump's America. 

Pride Month: Runs in the Family

Welcome back for Year 3 of my Pride Month series, in which I watch four LGBTQI+ movies in June, one per week, and tell you about them here.

The theme my first year formed as it went, and I ended up watching two movies about gay women and two movies about gay men, one of each in the "ancient" times of the past (both were before 1900) and one of each in present day. Last year, the movies I chose had the simple criterion of being previously unknown to me, and I think I ended up finding them all on Neflix, though that was not strictly a requirement of the theme. 

This year, it's an idea I flirted with last year: trans movies. I expect three of them to be previously unknown to me, leading to a fourth that I should have seen by now, but will not spoil until the time comes. 

And it feels like a good time in my cinematic journey to watch some more movies about trans people. Just last year, two movies with significant trans subject matter made my top ten of the year, those being Emilia Perez (#4) and The People's Joker (#6). And though I suspect that my affection for Emilia Perez might actually lose me some credibility in parts of my potential trans readership, since I know not everyone thought that was a good exploration of the trans experience, I think I'm in the clear on The People's Joker.

Netflix is likely be a crutch again this year, but I already know my final movie will not be available there, so at least my Pride Month series is not also a case of shilling for one particular streamer.

The last trans movie I watched was, in fact, on Netflix, that being Will & Harper, which I saw on the eve of my ranking deadline in January. That film has something in common with the first trans movie I'm watching this year during Pride Month, which is Ian Gabriel's 2023 film Runs in the Family.

No, the commonality I'm talking about is not that both feature trans characters. It's a bit more specific than that. Both movies feature a road trip between two characters who have known each other for a long time, and are feeling each other out following the (relatively) recent coming out of one of them as trans.

That's a bit of an oversimplification of what's going on in this South African film, which, you'll be surprised to know, does not feature Sharlto Copley at any point. It does more or less start with this road trip, which features single father Varun (Ace Bhatti) and his 24-year-old son, a trans man named River (Gabe Gabriel, related to the director I'm sure). Varun didn't have any help raising River because his mother bugged out when he was a baby, claiming she never wanted to be a mother but that Varun made her bring the baby to term. She's Monica, played by Diaan Lawrenson. As you might expect from such a character, she's now in a rehab that she can't leave without a relative checking her out, which is where Varun and River come in. River has disavowed her and hasn't seen her since she left, but Varun doesn't qualify as a relative because he never actually married Monica. They can't dawdle, though, because River has to get back in time to perform in a big drag show whose top prize is $50,000, which he wants to use for his top surgery. 

I should say that from the logline of this film on Netflix, I wasn't sure if it was right as the first entry in this series. There seemed to be at least some indication that this was largely from the father's perspective, on how having a trans son impacts him. Nothing could be further from reality. This film is resplendent with pride and color, much more River's story than Varun's, and it shies away from exactly none of the subjects a movie about trans people should touch on. (Interestingly, I am now remembering that it had a trigger warning for "strong sex scenes" and that those were nowhere to be found -- outside of a scene where River kisses a non-binary character. If that's a "strong" sex scene then I wonder if Netflix isn't a little squeamish with its trigger warnings.)

In any case, there's a huge amount here about drag culture, and that leads me to what I thought was a delightful discovery. Although the very nature of the LGBTQI+ experience is that it takes all kinds, I hadn't previously considered that there were would be trans men who would want to perform drag. Just so we're clear what we're talking about here, a trans man is someone who was born with the biological parts of a woman, who aspires to present in a more masculine fashion as an outward incarnation of how he feels inwardly. Logically, you would think that a trans man wouldn't need to do drag if he wanted to dress in traditional women's clothing -- he could just lean into his biology and be an actual woman. But I loved how it was clear that drag is just part of his community, and he's as likely to be friends with drag queens and trans women as other trans men. 

The film is a really lovely look at all these characters, particularly the supportive Varun. (It's not surprising I would identify with Varun, as a father myself.) You get the sense that Varun has had River's back since one second after he told Varun he was trans, so in that sense, it deviates from something like Will & Harper. Not that Will Ferrell is ever, for a moment, anything less than supportive of Harper Steele, but their road trip is founded on the notion that there is something that's changed about their relationship that they have to navigate to avoid awkwardness. Perhaps that awkwardness is just far in the past for Varun and River, but Varun is so lovely that it's easy to believe it never existed. 

Although Monica herself is a problematic character -- won't reveal too much about her in case you watch this, which you should -- her problems have nothing to do with her being a bigot. In fact, although she's a bit uncouth, her comments are more disarming than sinister. She's not precious around River because she thinks him being trans is not a big deal, and he does not need to be protected from comments that might seem flippant because it's clear to her that she doesn't have a problem with him being trans. And really, that's clear to the audience as well.

And for sure, we don't feel the need to feel precious about River either. I'm going to make a comment now that risks being misinterpreted, but I'm doing it to illustrate a point about the types of expectations some people might carry into watching a movie about the trans experience. One of the most striking things about River is how "normal" he is. That's not to suggest that anything about being trans is abnormal, though we know that there are plenty of people who think there is. It's to point out the fact that even people who fully support trans men and trans women might think there is something essentially impossible to hide about what they are doing, that there is something inevitable about their persona that strikes us as a performance of masculinity or a performance of femininity. That doesn't come across at all with River; in fact, so little did it come across that I was slightly suspicious of the scenes in this movie where someone immediately clocks him as a person born with female body parts, because for all intents and purposes he looks, sounds and acts like a person born with male body parts.

And of course I know that the whole point behind being LGBTQI+ is that there is no one way a person born with male body parts should be expected to look, act or sound. I think what I'm trying to say is that for anyone who thinks being trans is inevitably a perversion that can't help but call attention to itself and be constantly detectable at a perceptual level, River defies those preconceptions. I think many if not most people wouldn't know the difference. Which, for River, is absolutely 100% the goal. 

Runs in the Family of course has its third act crisis and then its happier denouement, and those are all pretty satisfying. I never actually got emotional but on a couple occasions I felt on the verge of getting emotional. Which is to say, it's a four-star movie not a four-point-five or five-star movie. 

It did, however, end on a bit of a sour note that had nothing to do with the movie directly, but did raise my consciousness about what even a film like this, which you suspect would have the fullest support of everyone involved with making it, is up against.

I stayed to watch the whole credits because I was enjoying the music and the still photos of the anonymous (they aren't introduced as characters) drag dancers who appear in the big competition. So that means I stayed long enough to see the following disclaimer on screen:

"Produced with the assistance of Department of Trade, Industry and Competition South Africa, who do not accept any liability for the content and who do not necessarily support such content."

I bet that doesn't appear at the end of every movie produced with the assistance of Department of Trade, Industry and Competition South Africa.

If it wasn't before now, it should be abundantly clear that in every trans success, there's a chilling reminder of how much farther there is to go. 

Pride Month: Your Name Engraved Herein

As we reached my final weekly Pride Month viewing for 2024, I had narrowed down my choices to two movies featuring gay men, which was the idea after two previous movies about lesbians and one previous movie about gay men. And as you remember, in addition to choosing to watch four movies I had never heard of prior to this month, I also had an informal international theme brewing, having previously watched movies set in Australia, Italy and South Africa. 

The options were The Boys in the Band, set in America, and Your Name Engraved Herein, set in Taiwan. Both movies are from 2020. 

Having had a long day in the office on Wednesday, I was initially inclined to watch The Boys in the Band, preventing myself from having to read subtitles. However, part of me wondered if this choice was in the spirit of the new discoveries theme. The movie is produced by Ryan Murphy and has such familiar stars as Zachary Quinto, Jim Parsons and Matt Bomer, though I couldn't be sure if I'd actually heard of it before. The title sounded familiar, but I could have just been confusing it with last year's George Clooney movie The Boys in the Boat, which I have not yet seen. Then there was also the idea that the informal international theme is stronger for a movie set in Taiwan than a movie set in America. 

With positives and negatives for both choices, I decided just to go with the shorter movie. And Your Name Engraved Herein was seven minutes shorter, 114 vs. 121. (Both of which were actually too long for a Wednesday in which I was so tired that I'd slept through my train stop coming home, only to do some sawing of fence panels and a trip to the grocery store after I got home.)

First I had to find the movie, having remembered its premise more than its title. A whole trip through my Netflix queue (I'm only watching Netflix movies this Pride Month) did not reveal it, so I had to search the LGBTQ filter and then it popped right up.

Kuang-Hui Liu's film focuses on two teenage boys with feelings for each other just after the 1987 lifting of martial law in Taiwan. Just because government oppressiveness has been diminished, though, doesn't mean society is just going to start throwing its arms around homosexuals. So as it was for people in all parts of the world in 1987, the boys are forced to hide their feelings and even to question whether they can be cured of these "unnatural" desires. Making matters more complicated, the boys attend a Catholic school where they are repeatedly told these desires are sinful, though they receive council from a Canadian priest who may have also had, may still have, these desires.

Your Name Engraved Herein was the least successful for me of the four movies I watched for Pride Month, but only by a slim margin, as it stuck the landing after some rough middle patches. Without spoiling anything for a movie you're not likely to see anyway, I'll say the ending had a little bit of a Past Lives vibe, and not just because the characters are Asian. (Though again not trying to spoil too much, there's a part where one character says he "never saw [the other] again," which ended up being disproven by the story.)

The thing that kind of bothered me was the inconsistent characterization of the two leads. Chang Jia-han, played by Edward Chen, is effectively the main character, a buttoned-up type who plays horns in the school band and is essentially a model student. His on-and-off paramour/best friend, nicknamed Birdy because he's the crazy one of the pair (based on the movie Birdy apparently), is the one who challenges norms and behaves in an openly eccentric manner, not appearing to care what others think of him. He's also the one who receives most of the assumptions by his classmates that he's queer.

Yet the two seem to switch roles from time to time about which one wants to hide his true nature and which one is more scared about being identified, and there are parts where I thought one was just inexplicably mean to the other for no reason I could identify in the script. Now, I did wonder if I'd missed a crucial line of dialogue at one point, due to being sleepy (and needing to nap a couple times during the movie), which would better contextualize this. But I ultimately decided I hadn't and it was just a case of inconsistency in the script. Some of Birdy's behavior ultimately gets an explanation as the movie goes on, but it still left me unsatisfied during key dramatic turns.

I would say also the movie did not contain many surprises in terms of its consideration of this subject matter, though that needn't be a prerequisite for this sort of movie, as depiction is often enough -- especially in a part of the world with significantly retrograde views on homosexuality specifically, and being different generally. A lot of the narrative beats seemed familiar to me, and I didn't ache for these characters the way I should have, in part due to some deficits in the hurried way their relationship is initially established, and in part due to Birdy's mercurial nature, whether that was a failing in the writing or an intentional choice.

I did get there in the end, though, and I found the last shot of the film particularly effective. It left me with a wistful feeling about how far the world has come since 1987 but how far it still has to go, and that seems like a good note on which to end things for the month.

I'm already starting to think of viewing themes for June 2025 as I continue to make this an annual tradition. And though I probably won't fit it in before the end of June, I'm looking forward to watching a new release for Pride Month on Netflix, which is the documentary Outstanding: A Comedy Revolution, about the history of LGBTQI+ stand-up comedy. 

Pride Month: Valley of a Thousand Hills

As my Pride Month viewings get further along, I'm noticing themes develop beyond the original themes.

At the outset of this June, I decided I was going to watch four LGBTQI+ movies that I had never heard of before, plucked from my streaming services, one per week. The first two were both on Netflix, so I've decided not to try to diversify and go only with stuff on Netflix. 

But as I chose my third movie this week, I noticed a second theme emerge, which is that this has become a bit of a world tour.

I started, appropriately enough, in Australia in week 1, with Ellie & Abbie (and Ellie's Dead Aunt). In week 2 I shifted to Italy, which played host to The Invisible Thread. 

Now, week 3 finds me in South Africa, where the action of 2022's Valley of a Thousand Hills takes place. 

It'll be easy enough to stick the landing on this secondary theme as long as my fourth movie is not set in Australia, Italy or South Africa. 

One of the things that drew me to this movie -- other than it appearing in the LGBTQ filter on Netflix -- was the title. Having watched the film, I now know and love what it means.

Bonie Sethibe's film doesn't put too fine a point on it, but I caught it. When the woman you see in this poster, Thenjiwe (Sibongokuhle Nkosi), tells her secret lover, Nosipho (Mandisa Vilakazi), about the life they could have "just beyond these hills," it's suggesting a future free from worries about being ostracized or shaming their families -- or possibly even violence directed at them -- that is so close they can almost see it. But the true measure of their distance from this dream? What seems like only a few comparatively small hills is actually a thousand summits they have to cross -- the thousand roadblocks to a future happiness they should not have to fight for.

Nosipho is the daughter of an elder in their rural village, which keeps up some of the connections to the old ways but incorporates all the modern conveniences. The traditional outlooks are one of the connections to the old ways they keep, as Nosipho knows her father would not accept anything from her other than marrying a man as is expected of her. It isn't so much that any one person in this film is homophobic, but that they just have such an ingrained belief in what is the normal way and what might be a sign of someone being possessed by demons. Her mother has died, and her father is sick. Fortunately, she has a sympathetic auntie who knows and supports what Nosipho is without her having to spell it out in so many words.

We see the vociferous objection to their sexual preference more in Thenjiwe's mother, who overrides the gentler disposition of her husband in trying to marry their son, Thenjiwe's brother, to Nosipho, to strength ties and for the traditional exchange of cows and the like. Thenjiwe is more comfortable in her sexual orientation than Nosipho, more rebellious by nature and happy enough to cut herself off from her family and move to the closest big city, Durban, if that's what she needs to do to pursue a life that is true to her authentic self. But she's in love with someone who doesn't have the same sort of confidence, and that's a problem.

When I first started watching Valley of a Thousand Hills, I thought it might be one of those movies that does a lot more telling than showing, all the signs of a novice filmmaker. (This is indeed the only feature listed on IMDB for the writer-director.) As it went, though, I developed a real appreciation for some of the sophisticated things it's doing that don't call attention to themselves. One particular shot I loved showed Thenjiwe on the floor with the man who is meant to be her husband standing over her. We see her straight on and we only see him in the three mirrors behind her, a tryptic of reflections that loom over her. I'm not saying it's a new device to show a character who is in power from an angle that emphasizes his power. I'm saying that the image of three of him surrounding her, representing the obstacles of society at large, was executed excellently and with clarity of purpose.

At first I was not sure if the movie would be a bit tame, in adherence to the more traditional values of its expected audience. Like, I can make a movie for my fellow South Africans in which characters are lesbians, but showing them kissing would be a bridge too far. But we do ultimately see them kissing, and even in bed without any clothing, though it is all pretty tasteful and the bedsheets are in all the right places to keep it so. 

The movie reminded me a bit thematically -- and in other ways I won't spoil -- of my #5 movie of the 2010s, Tanna, in which the forbidden romance also has to do with an arranged marriage, though the characters there are heterosexual. In that Vanuatu-set film, Wawa and Dain are kept apart because she's been promised to the son of a chieftain from another tribe, also in that case to solidify ties between the previously warring tribes. (Ain't that what they've tried to do throughout history, am I right?) However, I did take from Tanna what I thought was a secret "love is love" message, thematically a movie about gay marriage even though it was overtly about heterosexual marriage. So this film just takes it one step further. And yes, I do realize it may seem like I'm comparing them primarily because they both involve characters with black skin, living in or with ties to the traditional ways, which I suppose is my own shortcoming. Though since you probably haven't seen either movie, you'll just have to trust me that the similarity is there.

In another way the film defied my expectations, I thought the performances might seem like real novice turns. But I really liked what both of the leads bring to their roles, perhaps especially the conflicted Vilakazi as Nosipho. It was a film that majorly grew on me as it went, culminating with difficult truths that prevent what we hope can just be a happy ending. With gay people still fighting the prejudices of their own families, especially in parts of the world where progressive thinking is in short supply, the endings don't always get to be happy.

One more movie to go next week before we wrap up another Pride Month on The Audient. I'm choosing between two different titles, but each of them involve gay men, to get the gender balance right.

Pride Month: The Invisible Thread

In my second week of "Pride Month-themed viewings of LGBTQI+ movies I had never heard of," I chose The Invisible Thread, or Il Filo Invisibile, as it is known in Italian. (And that title may work better with the thread theme they've worked into the poster design.)

I had already added this to my Netflix watchlist the week before, but when it popped up as the movie advertised on the landing page -- which may or may not be customized to movies I've added to my watchlist, I'm not sure -- that clinched it. Made it seem worthier of my time, somehow. (Damn, advertising really works doesn't it.)

And I ended up being really happy with this choice as well, if not quite at the level of last week's film, Ellie & Abbie (and Ellie's Dead Aunt). (Though I should say, a moment in the climax pushed me to the brink of tears, which was closer than Ellie & Abbie got me.)

If this was only a 3.5-star movie to the previous film's four, it was a very warm 3.5 stars. But there's a reason I couldn't go all the way to four, and it has to do with the film's central conceit. 

The cross-armed character you see here, Leone (Francesco Gheghi), is meant to be making a movie about the relationship of his two fathers, as they weather the political currents that go from allowing them to have a civil union, to allowing both fathers' names to appear on Leone's birth certificate, to potentially losing that last right, thereby returning to a state where one of the two dads is granted more legal legitimacy than the other.

The problem is, after a few opening minutes of footage from the film, the whole concept is basically dropped. Oh there are a few other random references to the movie he's supposed to be making, but 30 minutes of screen time might elapse between them, tending to diminish what at one point seemed like it was going to be a central structural tenet of the film. It was enough so that even though the rest of the movie was charming me and moving me, I couldn't fully forgive what seemed to be such a basic screenwriting error.

Much of the rest of the content makes up for that omission. One thing I particularly liked about The Invisible Thread is that the two fathers, Paolo (Filippo Timi) and Simone (Francesco Scianna), are not happily married. In fact, the story's inciting incident is that Simone loses his phone between the cushions of their coach, where Paolo is sitting when Simone is texted by his lover. This is how he discovers his husband has been cheating on him for two years, though his own loss of spontaneity and defunct notions of romance are partially to blame. 

The reason I liked this is that it's believable. It's real. In most movies we see, there is a tendency to portray people in gay marriages as happy beyond their wildest dreams, and just as loyal. Particularly in pockets of cinema that hadn't previously been comfortable portraying gay marriages on screen -- your bigger studios and the like -- there is a deathly fear that if you depict a gay marriage as less than complete bliss -- or worse, torn apart by cheating -- you are somehow indicting or undermining the entire institution of gay marriage. Any group that finds themselves on the receiving end of pandering tokenism wants to be portrayed complexly rather than as saints, and The Invisible Thread does a really good job at that. Not only is there an extramarital relationship, but each man seeks revenge on the other in petty ways that strike at the heart of the other's materialism.

This is not to say the film is always subtle. You get reminders throughout that these are the countrymen of Roberto Benigni, and so there's more than one scene of physical comedy where characters are at each others' throats and playing to the back row. But really, these are in small doses and they are more funny than they are ever approaching groan-worthy.

Although Paolo and Simone have a significant share of the screen time, the movie is of course told from the perspective of their son, who doesn't actually know which one is his biological father because the two injected a cocktail of their sperm into the surrogate (an American who is still in the picture. She's played by Jodhi May). Leone is not gay, but he does have an interesting relationship with a French brother and sister who have just come to town -- he likes her, but she thinks her brother might be good for him, because she makes a silly assumption about Leone's sexuality based on the sexuality of his fathers. I think we are meant to believe that she made this assumption more because of Leone's smaller stature and potentially effeminate behaviors, but he's understandably mad about it and really, he has every right to be. The time spent on this potential relationship with her (she's played by Giulia Maenza, who could be a model) is probably the time that might have been spent showing him struggle with making his film, though it's probably right that he's involved in a relationship himself because he is the main character.

The content that probably moved me most was this notion that Italian law might annul the previous birth certificate that allowed both fathers' names to appear, so they'd have to go back to just one -- but which one? Now that they might be splitting up, it matters more which name is on the certificate, which sperm swam into the awaiting egg, possibly for custody reasons. They never wanted to know, but now they sort of do, or sort of must, either of which is tragic. It's clear that even though their relationship might be in trouble as a result of actions of their own doing, it has always been threatened by a society that can't quite become progressive enough to fully accept them.

Next week I'll pick another off the watchlist of one of my streaming services, though maybe I'll share the love with something other than Netflix, given that it's gotten my first two Pride Month viewings. 

Pride Month: Ellie & Abbie (and Ellie's Dead Aunt)

I watched one movie per week in honor of Pride Month in June of 2023, and this year I'm confirming it will be an annual tradition.

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. 

Pride Month: Ammonite

I'm surprised it's taken me three years to see Ammonite, considering what it looked to me like it could be: the next Portrait of a Lady on Fire.

I probably haven't prioritized it sooner, even with its availability on Kanopy, because then I thought "If it were the next Portrait of a Lady on Fire, I'd have heard a lot more people talking about it."

Ammonite does, though, make a great final of my four weekly LGBTQI+ viewings for Pride Month this June, especially since it bookends with Wilde, both qualifying as gay romances set in the historical past -- this one a good 50 years before that one.

And even though it boasts two Oscar nominees in Saoirse Ronan and Kate Winslet -- the latter having actually taken home a statue -- Ammonite proves that a similar time period, similar rocky coastal setting and similar subject matter are not enough to conjure the distinct alchemy of ingredients that makes a masterpiece like Celine Sciamma's film. 

And that's okay -- Ammonite should be content just to be very good.

The film, set around 1850 it would seem, features Winslet as Mary Anning, a slightly older -- compared to her paramour anyway -- woman living in Lyme, Dorset, who specialises in digging fossils out of the cliffside and filing away the extra dirt and mud to reveal only the scientific discovery left behind. She is indeed a scientist by nature, though to pay the bills she has to sell these ammonite treasures to collectors on the high end of the scale, tourists on the low end. Her shop also features cheaper, as in less scientifically significant, products like mirrors lined with seashells.

It's a fairly grumpy and solitary existence -- she has a little support, though not very lively support, from her mother (Gemma Jones), who is also her roommate -- but it leaves Mary contented enough. It's evident from her pained interactions with a former lover played by Fiona Shaw that she never expected to have a man around, and that any of her own children were then obviously out of the question.

Her routine is jolted by the arrival of a gentleman (James McArdle) who wants to observe Mary in her work as his own form of scientific exploration, and is willing to pay her for it. His wife Charlotte (Ronan) is recovering from the shock of losing a child -- we can assume based on only very minimal evidence in the dialogue -- and is rarely fit enough to get out of bed. When he's called back to London for an expected period of six weeks, he offers to further compensate Mary if she'll take Charlotte out with her, as the sea air and companionship will do her good. And if you saw Portrait of a Lady on Fire, you can guess what happens from there.

Francis Lee's film is not nearly the swooningly romantic film that Sciamma's is, though it makes up for that in fairly graphic love scenes, especially considering the high profile of these actresses. Still, it convinces us easily of the development of intense feelings between the two women, both recovering from a sort of trauma, holding on to the other as a sort of life preserver. Winslet and Ronan are capable of expressing an untold number of internal ruminations just through a few flicks of their facial features, and it's a joy to watch them work with each other. They develop a palpable chemistry, but also a tremendous respect for one another. Their union is certainly opportunistic in nature on both halves, but it's not exploitative. They come together mutually, rather than either taking advantage of the other's fragile state.

I was also interested to see Lee explore the conflict between love and Mary's professional pursuits. At the time this was set, the idea that any woman would pursue anything professionally was absurd, and yet Mary thinks progressively enough that she balks at the idea of sacrificing her career, even if it means closer proximity to the woman she loves. 

I further enjoyed this being the only of the four movies I watched where the characters' sexuality is not specifically a point of societal outrage. Surely side characters in this film suspect what is going on between Mary and Charlotte, but there never needs to be a scene where one or both of them is dragged out into the town square and flogged, metaphorically or otherwise, for engaging in sins of which proper citizens can barely speak. This really is just a love story between two people, and the fact of their same gender is almost incidental.

And perhaps that is a fitting note on which to end a month of movies whose underlying goal, for all else they may set out to accomplish, is to help normalize same gender romance for as much of society as possible. 

Pride Month: Pariah

Although there have been great steps forward in cinematic LGBTQI+ representation in recent years, there's still one subsection of this community that remains drastically underserved:

Butch lesbians.

I have often wondered why there are so few -- any? -- movies about butch lesbians out there, but I actually haven't really wondered because the answer is obvious:

A studio does not feel like it can sell a movie about butch lesbians.

Gay men? Easy, especially lately. Lipstick lesbians? Sure. It's every man's fantasy. Transgender or non-binary? We are starting to see these characters really flourish on screen.

But butch lesbians remain a tough sell. For one, there is nothing flamboyant about them, and flamboyance is something that plays well on screen in whatever form it takes. If you're talking about two characters who have short hair, wear flannel shirts, are maybe a bit pudgy and bear a bit of a resemblance to one another, that is not the sort of colorful display to which a camera is traditionally drawn.

In a way, lipstick lesbians and butch lesbians are each others' exact opposites in terms of cinematic appeal. The former could potentially please all four quadrants of the cisgender viewing population: straight men, gay men, straight women and gay women. Straight men fantasize about lipstick lesbians, if we are to believe the copious amounts of porn in existence about such women. Gay men find them a bit fabulous and aspirational, especially the drag portion of the gay male audience. Straight women are generally supportive of women on screen and also aspire to the beauty of these characters. And of course gay women, either lipstick lesbians or butch lesbians, have many of the same fantasies about such women that straight men do, and if they don't, they are in it just for the representation.

Butch lesbians? One quadrant at best. And even the gay women in the audience may want something more aspirational, something that doesn't remind them so much of themselves. (Yes, there is self-loathing among all people, and especially in the gay community.)

(Side note: I am aware that these terms are very reductive. I know no person is reducible to a set of stereotypical traits. However, these terms have also been used historically to differentiate for the purposes of commentary and analysis so I am engaging them here.)

Despite the likelihood of disappointment, I was determined to find whatever butch lesbian movies were out there. As discussed, the pickings were slim. Though to be fair, I stopped after one reddit thread because I recognized one of the two titles mentioned right away, both by the film itself and by the director. (The other was a Thai film and I didn't even start to look it up.)

Dee Rees directed a movie that made my top ten of the year it was released, Mudbound in 2017. At the time I saw and loved it, I knew that Rees was known for her prior feature, Pariah, which was her debut and released in 2011. 

Pariah might not be a butch lesbian movie quite in the way I had anticipated. I guess my core idea of a butch lesbian is the sort of white women wearing the clothing and with the haircut I mentioned above. But no one would call Alike (uh-LEE-kay) -- known as Li -- a lipstick lesbian, so at least that's something.

Li (Adepero Oduye) is a 17-year-old living in New York, an aspirational writer whose primary medium is poetry. She isn't out to her family, though they have their suspicions, especially her younger sister (Sahra Mellesse), who teases her but is accepting of what she knows her sister is. Their mother (Kim Wayans) doesn't want her daughter to hang out with her out friend Laura (Pernell Walker), the closest this film has to a true butch lesbian, and sees what's going on despite the fact that she can't bear to think about it. Their father (Charles Pernell) is kinder to Li but only because he's in deep denial. Li starts to see a new girl (Aasha Davis) on the sly, and things are about to become a lot more complicated for all of them.

A very brief 87 minutes, Pariah is not heavy on plot as it basically takes Li through a familiar series of coming of age beats -- or, maybe more appropriately, coming into her sexuality beats. More than its details about that part of her growth, the film distinguishes itself for the intersection between its look at sexuality and its look at the Black community of 2011. Although Rees is too shrewd of a filmmaker to come out and say it, the film is wrestling with a particular level of acute homophobia that has always been ascribed to the Black community. There are some interesting gender complications thrown in here as well, as both Li's and Laura's mothers are the hardest on them, inclined to shut them out completely. This has already happened with Laura's mother and Li's mother seems to be going down a similar path. 

If there is something a little rudimentary in the storytelling of Pariah, it could be because a) small independent dramas are not typically heavy on complicated plots or unexpected developments, and b) in 2011, a story like this was probably new enough in "mainstream" cinema (I'd hardly call this a mainstream film, even though it features some known actors) that it doesn't need to be anything more than a primer on this type of character and the prejudices she endures. Those prejudices are pretty strong, as the title suggests exactly how unwanted Li feels.

And to its credit, Pariah has a very strong denouement -- perhaps not an unexpected one, but one that is executed confidently and with emotional potency. By the end of only 87 minutes we have come to really understand Li and have some better idea what she's going through -- knowing that without actually walking in her shoes, we will never fully understand it. When she weeps on the floor in frustration, our hearts really go out to her.

I guess I'm still looking for my idea of what a real butch lesbian film would look like. Perhaps because Li is an artist, because she is reasonably stylish and because her sexual preference doesn't scream out from her appearance, I feel like this is still a marketable lesbian story. Perhaps, because it's the movie business (emphasis on "business") we are talking about, we'll never see "real" butch lesbians as protagonists of their own movie.

One final film next week involving lesbians from history, who I can tell you for sure will not be butch.

Pride Month: Holding the Man

After last week's first weekly movie for Pride Month was chosen at random by scrolling through three different streaming services, I came up with a framework for these eventual four viewings.

Since that was a movie addressing queer issues from history, and specifically male homosexuality, I decided I'd continue with a modern film featuring primarily gay men, then watch a modern film featuring primarily gay women, and finish with a movie about historical lesbians -- even if that history is fictitious in nature. And part of that structure was dictated by the fact that I already have my eye on a fourth film in the series that will fit into that slot nicely.

Now, I'm aware this does mean that I am basically not considering movies about trans people. That's only an accidental exclusion based on deciding on this system that otherwise equitably distributes the content between men and women, today and yesterday. Then again, there are fewer such movies, especially fewer movies that treat that subject with any sensitivity -- and since those movies would tend to be more recent, there's a good chance I've already seen them if they've reached any level of prominence.

You could argue that the 2015 Australian film Holding the Man is also a bit of history in that it takes place between the 1970s and 1990s. But I think the distinction I'm really making is between films where you really couldn't even talk about being gay in public, and films where at least homosexuality wouldn't get you thrown in prison, like it did for Oscar Wilde. I'm not going to suggest that being gay has ever been easy, even today when it has been allowed entrance into mainstream popular culture and governance of basic human rights.

I also didn't realize until I started watching Holding the Man that it was an AIDS movie, and it certainly seems relevant to have one of those in the four I'm watching this month.

The film was on my radar because it made waves, to the extent that Australian movies make waves, when it was released back in 2015. I remembered it was very fondly received, but once I'd missed it on its initial run, I never found the right circumstance to catch up with it later. I'm by no means an Australian movie completist, and my year-long series viewing Australian films was a year before that in 2014.

The film stars Ryan Corr as Timothy Conigrave (who goes by Tim), the author of a play and memoir about this relationship with John Caleo (Craig Stott). I'm becoming increasingly familiar with Corr's work as he's appeared in two Australian films I've seen in the past year, Russell Crowe's The Water Diviner and Stephen Johnson's High Ground. He's a charismatic leading man, and his Tim is more the stereotype, to the extent that stereotypes had been established back in 1976 when the story starts. He acts and he's known for being gregarious and flamboyant, though Corr really underplays the flamboyance and you're almost surprised when characters accuse him of being effeminate. Stott's John is the "surprise" in terms of the expectations, as he's more quiet and also a football player. (Australian Rules Football, of course.) Footy, as it's called, is primarily popular in Victoria, and indeed, that's where this film is set. I won't say I recognized any locations, but a lot of place names were very familiar.

The story follows the two over the course of the next 15 years from when they meet and fall in love as high school students, both ostracized by their families initially. There's some improvement in that regard over the years, but in some cases it's more a defeated resignation than an actual embrace of their brother/son and his lifestyle. The film jumps around in time just a little bit, kind of shuffling the deck in time periods, but in a logical way that progresses what we know about the characters and what befalls them, not anything experimental in nature. We witness the pre-AIDS free love period and its unfortunate consequences, and overall, their extreme general devotion to each other, despite the occasional failures to live up to that devotion.

I won't say who gets AIDS, but in any AIDS movie, you know it's not likely to end well. And those scenes are pretty devastating in the commitment to documenting the physical consequences of the disease.

I was really surprised by the amount of support from known names in very small roles. Each man has a father played by an Australian acting icon, Anthony LaPaglia in one case and Guy Pearce in the other. They do ultimately each accumulate maybe ten minutes of screen time, but that's still pretty small in a 128-minute movie. It occurs to me that this is a fairly common practice among Australian actors, to support smaller projects even though they could theoretically have competing offers with more prominent roles from Hollywood. (At least in Pearce's case that could be true, probably not so much LaPaglia.) I can't see someone like Russell Crowe doing this -- he'd make it all about him -- nor someone like Chris Hemsworth, though not for reasons of egotism in his case probably. I can see Hemsworth doing it later in his career.

Then there's also Sarah Snook, who has taken off in the years since (Succession) but was still probably relatively unknown at this point. Finally you have a scene of Geoffrey Rush as a homophobic acting coach, which I was surprised not to see featured in the initial burst of closing credits but rather waiting until the full cast was listed. I know Rush has become problematic/cancelled in recent years (I'm not going to look up the particulars right now) so maybe people were already well aware of it by that point.

Overall this is just a very well made movie about life and love in the AIDS era, never didactic or on the nose in any of the issues it discusses, and always guided by strong performances. I might have given it even more than four stars on Letterboxd except that in the end it ultimately hews to fairly standard presentation and a fairly (sadly) familiar story. It's quite good but maybe just shy of exceptional.

Okay, next week we move on to the first of two lesbian stories, though this third movie is the only one I have not yet identified. 

Pride Month: Wilde

There isn't much that I, a nearly 50-year-old man coaching my son's basketball team and doing improvements to my house in greater Melbourne, can do to make an impact supporting LGBTQI+ people during Pride Month.

But I can watch one pride-themed movie per week this June, and write about it here.

I went cruising for gay-themed movies on my streaming services last night (forgive the cheeky choice of words -- most gay men, known for their sense of humor, would probably approve). Disney+ actually had a good LGBTQI+-themed section they were advertising prominently -- good, as in smartly curated and presented, though not very extensive, as you might expect. (In fact, lest you think I went to Disney first because of the high probability of success in this area, I'll mention I was in there for another reason entirely.) I had already seen all the movies on there, which I actually anticipated might be a problem since I do tend to see a good percentage of the gay-themed movies that break through into the zeitgeist.

I didn't necessarily want the first movie I watched to be something super zeitgeisty -- I was happy to discover something I'd never heard of -- but I also wanted it to have the right look and feel, something of a particular level of craftsmanship. I thought Kanopy would be a good port of call, and they did have a section on "gender and sexuality" -- but it contained mostly cheap-o documentaries, and it wasn't really documentaries I wanted to spend my time on this month. 

Finally I ended up on Amazon, which did not have a special section for queer subject matter (shame shame), but I went through the various potentially relevant sections, such as "romance movies," to examine the tags of movies I didn't know. There were a couple prospects that were listed as LGBTQI+ themed, but I'm glad I continued on because the absolutely right option did ultimately present itself.

I believe it was in the "historical dramas" or some similar section where I found, without an LGBTQI+ tag, the 1997 film Wilde, directed by Brian Gilbert. (Who, I would later remind myself, directed a film I really liked a few years before this, Tom & Viv, about T.S. Eliot.) 

I felt hazily aware of it, but maybe should have remembered it better because Stephen Fry received a Golden Globe nomination for his work in the lead role. Since Oscar Wilde was, of course, gay -- and since I don't actually know all that much about the particulars of his life -- it did indeed feel like the perfect choice.

To say nothing of the cast. The actors I would see as babies in this film included Jude Law, Michael Sheen, Ioan Gruffud, Jennifer Ehle and Orlando Bloom -- the latter of whom was comically listed as a star of the movie in the advertising materials on Amazon, even though he literally only has one scene with literally only one line of dialogue. Then also the likes of Tom Wilkinson and Vanessa Redgrave, not as babies, but as slightly younger adults -- 26 years younger, to be exact. In fact, given the famous faces in this film, the fact that it wasn't more on my radar is a sign of something -- perhaps of the very aversion to homosexual themes this film devotes its time to dramatizing. (Not an aversion on my part, but an aversion on the part of our collective film conversation, which keeps some films in the spotlight beyond the year of their release while relegating others to historical footnotes.)

The film focuses on roughly the final 20 years of Wilde's life, starting in a very strange setting indeed. When I saw the familiar vistas and backdrops of your typical western opening this film, I wondered if perhaps I had wandered into the wrong theater. But it turns out that Wilde had an 1882 visit to Colorado to meet with salt-of-the-earth silver miners on a lecture tour of the U.S. It's here we get a first taste of his proclivities, when he descends into the mine and is greeted by several shirtless men, and makes a comment about their beauty making it more like an ascension to heaven then a descent into hell. Probably confused and not even knowing what a gay person was, the men make nothing of it -- nor was it clear to me to what extent anyone knew Wilde was gay, nor if Wilde even knew it himself, at this point.

He does marry Ehle's Constance, and father two children, but we see him as a bit hesitant to engage in the full extent of the passion she requires in a bedtime kiss. Rather instead, he descends back down to their guest, Robbie Ross (Sheen), who seduces him -- for what appears to be the first time for Wilde, though not for Ross.

Wilde is confused, but he does know that this is what he wants, and he has another fling with Gruffudd's character. (Whose name is John Gray, and who seemed to at least partially inspire Wilde's novel The Picture of Dorian Gray.) It's not until he meets Bosie Douglas (Law), a beautiful but petulant rich kid who bears the title of lord, that he forms a long-term relationship that can't escape public notice -- especially when the boy's father, John Douglas, the Marquess of Queensbury, says he will expose Wilde and have him arrested on charges of indecent behavior if he does not cease and desist with his son. (That's Wilkinson, but that sentence was getting too complicated to mention it.)

Before things go very south for Wilde, we see that there's a chance for the homosexual to win over the homophobe -- the sort of thing we hope can and will occur throughout our society today, to change the tide of hatred toward LGBTQI+ people. (Not that the burden should be on them to change the minds of others, but practically speaking, it is.) Wilde and Bosie are at a lunch when Bosie's father walks in and seats himself at another table, not seeing his son and his son's companion. Bosie has an instinct to flee, but Wilde encourages him not to -- in a preview of what his own choice will be when he is later on trial.

So Bosie goes over to his father and asks him to join them, knowing his father is aware of Wilde's reputation and knowing it will risk exposing him as a "bum boy," which is one of the many epithets his father has at his disposal. This is certainly an act of bravery on Bosie's part, but Bosie frequently acts in cowardice and just plain meanness -- so we can't read too much into it. But he does catch his initially resistant father in a clever trap, saying he doesn't know his father to be a man who places much stock in the opinions of others without forming his own. The elder Douglas cannot argue this and so does join the pair.

We watch as Wilde, using all his renowned gifts for language and persuasion, charms Douglas into a free and easy conversation lubricated by brandy and cigars. He knows just what to say to the man without kissing up to him, honoring his intelligence and speaking eloquently on areas of interest to Douglas, such as horse racing. Eventually they move to philosophy, where Wilde continues to be himself even though he disagrees with Douglas on most matters -- and this is something Douglas notes and respects. In short, just by being his erudite and charming self, Wilde makes himself an excellent companion for lunch, and Douglas talks to him almost as though he's talking to an old friend.

Only moments later we have lost any sense of optimism we may have once had. In Douglas' very next scene, he seems to have forgotten having had this pleasant lunch with Wilde, and doubles down on his objections to the man and his "perversions." It reminds me of how many people in our world today, on how many occasions, find themselves close to embracing the queer person in their life, only to fall back to their previous position of total condemnation. The fact that this moment does not take -- cannot take for someone like Douglas -- ultimately leads to Wilde's downfall.

I can tell you what happens to Wilde, because you can spoil a fiction film but you can't spoil documented history. Wilde serves two years of hard labor when confronted in court with "the love that dare not speak its name" -- more on that in a moment. His sentence is the harshest available to be issued by the disgusted judge. Wilde never cops to sodomy or the other acts of which he is accused, but tries to describe a Platonic ideal of a mentor-mentee love between and older and a younger man, to which he does admit. This is good enough for the court and they slap the cuffs on him. Although Bosie -- who is compromised throughout this movie, frequently treating Wilde terribly, especially in a scene where Wilde is sick in bed -- does try to remain loyal to him, and is there when Wilde is released from prison, a post-script tells us that they parted after three months and Wilde was dead of health problems acquired in prison by 1900 at age 46. 

Fry is really excellent in the role, witty and urbane as you would expect, a bon vivant with a bon mot available in any setting. However, I had mistakenly thought of Wilde as someone who was the winner in any social exchange, incapable of losing an argument and haughty in victory. Fry's performance reveals a significant melancholy, and frequently a modesty, to his character. Although he believed philosophically in experiencing everything life has to offer, which leads him to spend time with men in a setting that approximates the late 19th century version of an orgy, he doesn't really seem comfortable with it. In fact, he's a romantic at heart, devoted to Bosie -- even when Bosie frequently is unworthy of his affections.

The phrase "the love that dare not speak its name" made some connections for me to a movie I dearly loved 30 years ago when it came out, but have since been unable to find. (I should probably check again in our new streaming era.) For a long time and perhaps still, the 1994 film A Man of No Importance, starring Albert Finney -- a variation on the title of the Wilde play The Importance of Being Earnest -- was not able to be found for rental, and only for purchase in arcane and incompatible DVD formats. But when I saw it at Portland Maine's arthouse theater my senior year in college, it not only struck me as a warm and sympathetic movie about a man going through very similar trials to what Wilde went through, it also kind of started my relationship with independent/arthouse film, in a very real sense.

In that film, the Irish bus driver played by Finney -- Wilde was also Irish, and he sometimes played up the accent for the purposes of humor -- is mounting a version of Wilde's play Salome. The choice of play is probably enough to make the other townspeople suspicious of his sexual orientation, and indeed, the character talks about "the love that dare not speak its name" as he falls for a younger man in his play, played by Rufus Sewell. His female lead (played by Tara Fitzgerald) is sympathetic to the bus driver but his friends his age ostracize him when they start putting the pieces together, similar to what happened to Wilde in polite society in London. He lives in fear of how Sewell's character will despise him if he discovers the crush.

It's really a shame that to this day, men and women live in fear of what will happen to them if one unenlightened person in their life -- who they love despite their lack of enlightenment -- discovers something about them that will change their relationship entirely. It's no reason to stay in the closet, but it's plenty reason to shake your first at the sky and wish things were different. Maybe one day they will be. 

Did anyone else find Not Okay homophobic?

I first saw this poster for Not Okay in America, and always liked the poster. It led me to imagine a lot of possibilities for what the movie might be about. 

What it was actually about was pretty disappointing, but more on that later.

The poster alone was probably responsible for putting it on my docket on Thursday night, when I got a late start on trying to watch a movie and realized that my recently acquired iTunes rental of Tar was 158 minutes long. (The movie was 158 minutes long -- the rental was 30 days, then 48 hours once I started watching.)

**Spoilers for Not Okay.**

I'll start out by saying that almost every character in this movie is disagreeable in some way or another. I can think of only two, possibly three, or maybe a fourth character who doesn't make you want to slap them at some point during the movie. (Actually, the constantly crying dad is pretty slappable, even if his other traits are innocuous enough.)

But the gay characters are particularly disagreeable.

Let's start out by establishing our protagonist. Danni Sanders (Zoey Deutsch) is a hapless flibbertigibbet who is a photo editor at online culture magazine Depravity, but desperately longs to be a writer. Unfortunately, she has no clue. She submits an article called "Why Am I So Sad" that includes what she considers to be valid reasons for sadness, like living in Bushwick (Brooklyn) and having missed 9/11 because her family was on a cruise. I think you can already see the broadness of Not Okay. Danni is forever walking a line between just pitiable and actually toxic. 

However, this is our protagonist, and in the tradition of other flawed protagonists, she means well and acts out of insecurity/awkwardness more than malice.

That leaves the malice up for grabs, and the gay characters snatch it.

One more thing about Danni before we get to them. A text at the beginning gives a "humorous" twist on a trigger warning, letting us know that in addition to flashing lights, the movie has an unlikable female protagonist. This does end up being true. See, to get attention, Danni posts a bunch of pictures on Insta of supposedly being in Paris for a writer's workshop -- a "harmless" ruse that ends up becoming a problem for her when the actual Paris is rocked by a series of terrorist bombings. Danni has to explain her own safety and regale concerned followers with the experiences she's just been through. Instead of coming clean, Danni leans in to the attention and concocts a big survivor story that snowballs, goes viral, and ultimately unravels in a way familiar to anyone who's seen a movie about a character who gets in over their head on a "harmless" lie.

At the point of her first interaction with the two gay people who work with her, though, she's just insecure and awkward.

First we meet Harper (Nadia Alexander), a kiss-ass who shows up at the door of Danni's editor's office moments after said editor has chewed Danni out for the tone deaf story she submitted. By contrast, the editor (also a wicked caricature) heaps praise on Harper, who gloats superciliously and in a manner that seems specifically directed at Danni. She's the antagonist in this film in the strictest literary sense, in that she most directly counteracts the desires of the protagonist. This is not, of course, to say that anything she's guilty of is worse than anything Danni is guilty of.

A scene or two later, we see the two of them riding in an elevator alongside Larson (Dash Perry), another openly gay staffer at the magazine. Larson is initially friendly enough with Danni, explaining that he and Harper are going to "queer bowling" -- but understandably stiffens when Danni meets that with a cringey appropriation of "Yassss queen!" Fair enough. He quickly shuts her down when she makes an overture toward attending, confirming the event is only for people who identify as gay. After a few more awkward moments by Danni, she exits the elevator ahead of them and Harper says "I hate straight people." (I might be conflating this with another scene, but Harper definitely says she hates straight people at one point.) 

Larson never demonstrates anything other than justifiable annoyance with Danni, but he also shows no spine. Once she's "returned" from her trip and is telling her story to a group of eager onlookers at the Depravity offices, his superficiality emerges as he changes course and invites her to queer bowling -- so eager to sell out his own instincts about her problematic behavior in order to become a starfucker. (You might say this is compassion after Danni's ordeal, but the movie depicts him as having stars in his eyes at Danni's sudden celebrity.) Harper is also in attendance at this story, apparently also suckered by it, but we can tell from some quizzical looks that she's onto Danni.

We don't see a lot more of Larson, but Harper then proceeds to set about trying to ruin Danni -- partly out of the professional jealousy that has arisen from Danni's sudden success at Depravity, and partly out of, well, malice. (Doing a civic justice by exposing a fraud might also be a very small part of it, though she does mention how writing this story will benefit her career. Ugh.)

I might not be writing this post if it weren't for the extremely uncharitable representation of the film's third gay character, who is obviously coded as gay even if his sexuality is never mentioned. This is a talk show host played by Preston Martin, who unleashes a slew of vapid lingo as he conducts the most superficial interview ever with Danni -- cutting her off with "And that's all the time we have" before she's even gotten two sentences into her story, so they can do "goat yoga" or something. It's likely meant by writer-director Quinn Shepherd as a critique of the media in the social media age, but the way it's presented, his vapidity is intrinsically linked with his queerness.

Here's the problem with my whole argument: Shepherd herself is gay, and she's actually in a relationship with Alexander, who plays her antagonist.

Surely there is an argument to be made that being gay yourself excuses you of any accusations of homophobia. Any member of a minority group has unofficial license to skewer their own kind.

To me, though, this does not excuse you from careless filmmaking, even potentially irresponsible filmmaking. Even if I am not gay myself, I think I can sense when a movie is a bit too mean to its minority characters, whatever the minority might be. And I don't think it's being appropriative to feel offended on their behalf.

Shepherd might have helped things by including one queer character who wasn't vindictive, spineless or excessively shallow. The way she's structured the movie, the only characters who are given any depth at all are Danni and another actual survivor (of a school shooting) who has become something of an activist celebrity, played by Mia Isaac. Harper would probably be next closest, but any depth we get reflects poorly on her. When Danni asks why Harper has worked so hard to expose her, Harper's answer is "Because I don't like you."

Not great.

Sure Danni is clueless and easily led down bad paths, but when we first meet her she's friendly and it's clear she is just trying to find her place in the world. That Harper decided she doesn't like her at that point seems like excessive dumping on a person who is already her own worst enemy. 

I was surprised on Wikipedia to see that Not Okay has received "generally favorable reviews." I wonder if that has to do with what number of "sharp" critiques of our social media age those critics had seen before this one.

My classic example of this sort of movie is Ingrid Goes West, a 2017 film that made my top ten of that year. The pitfalls of "following" (i.e. online stalking) and watching others live their "best life" through Instagram are explored wickedly there. 

But if I saw Ingrid Goes West for the first time today, I'm sure it would suffer from the fact that I've seen too many other movies like this -- for example, just having seen Sissy less than a month ago. I didn't like Sissy much, and Not Okay is even worse. Even a superior example of the form like Ingrid Goes West has a tough battle to fight if the material has been done to death, which it now has.

Add in some (probably unintentional) gay bashing by a gay filmmaker, and you have a film that is, well, not okay.