Drama – Page 27 – Bitch Flicks

LGBTQI Week: The Kids Are Terrible, The Sex Is Worse

(Pour me another … this is going to be a long night.)

This is a guest review by Nino Testa. When The Kids Are All Right came out in 2010, it was widely considered one of the best films of the year. (I happen to think the movie kind of sucked, but there is no accounting for taste.) The film was written and directed by Lisa Cholodenko, who is best known for her 1998 film High Art, perhaps giving Kids queer cred in LGBT and straight circles. Kids tells the story of two queer mothers, Jules and Nic (played by Julianne Moore and Annette Bening respectively), whose annoying teenage children initiate contact with the donor whose sperm was used to impregnate each of the women. The mothers begrudgingly allow the contact, and in the middle of the movie Jules begins an affair with the sperm donor, played by the calm, cool and scruffy Mark Ruffalo. The emotional crux of the narrative revolves around Nic’s discovery of the affair, her subsequent emotional breakdown and the restoration of family tranquility as Nic decides to salvage her marriage despite Jules’ infidelity. Also: this is supposedly a comedy.

The film wasn’t just lauded as a cinematic achievement, it was also celebrated as a “positive” and “honest” representation of quotidian lesbian life in an age where gay marriage dominates any discussion of LGBT people. In addition to multiple Academy Award nominations—for acting, writing, and best picture, but not, interestingly enough, best director—the film has 93% positive reviews on rottentomatoes, so pretty much everyone who gets to decide that movies are good told us that this one was worthy of our time. Many of the reviews focus on the film’s supposedly groundbreaking “realistic” depiction of lesbians (I guess these people have never seen The Hunger.) Eric Snider from film.com refers to the characters as “realistically portrayed.” A.O. Scott from the New York Times writes: “The performances are all close to perfect, which is to say that the imperfections of each character are precisely measured and honestly presented.” Tom Long of the Detroit News called it “one of the year’s most honest and endearing films.” (“Honest” is the key word in all of these reviews. We might want to think about what it means to call a work of fiction “honest.” To say that it is “honest” means that it confirms, in some way, our worldview; it proves something we think to be true.) And then there is this gem from The Wall Street Journal, which really sums up the self-congratulatory, progressive reviews of this film: “The basic joke here, and it’s a rich one, is that the dynamics of gay marriages differ little from those of straight marriages.” This is, of course, the ultimate compliment that the mainstream press can make about queer people—that they are just like straight people. Judging from the film, what seems to be at stake is whether or not gay married couples can be as unhappy and passive aggressive as straight married couples, thus making them more deserving of legal protections.

In a Shewired.com article by Kathy Wolfe, the founder of Wolfe, the world’s largest exclusive distributor of lesbian and gay movies, Wolfe sings the film’s praises for its place in lesbian film history, calling it, without a shred of irony, “The Lesbian Brokeback Mountain”:

For a variety of reasons, The Kids Are All Right will be the most widely distributed lesbian-themed mainstream movie in history. Like that beloved yet sad gay cowboy movie, it has major stars in the gay roles: Julianne Moore and Annette Bening as lesbian moms. This ensures that the film will reach a wide audience. Most exciting of all — with its entertaining yet ultimately politically powerful message of putting a lesbian family front and center — the film will open hearts and minds very much like Brokeback did on its theatrical release.

Let’s read that statement again: “the politically powerful message of putting a lesbian family front and center.” What makes the film a positive political intervention, for Wolfe, is that lesbians exist as subjects, never mind the content of the film. Wolfe goes on to discuss “how far we’ve come” in the representation of lesbians in cinema and express her gratitude for the wide release of this film—suggesting that the sheer existence of LGBT-themed films by LGBT people (Cholodenko is queer-identified) is an unquestionably good thing for LGBT people, no matter what the films are about.

OK—so that’s the story about the film. Now, what of the film itself?

Let’s start with perhaps the most memorable scene in the movie, which finds Jules and Nic trying to make whoopee, but unable to get into the groove. They call in the big guns, as it were, and pop in some outdated gay male porn to get their juices flowing. Nic watches the porn while Jules—completely covered by bedding, because, you know, why would anyone want to see themselves having sex with Julianne Moore? So much for realism—takes care of business. Their annoying son catches them in the act and has a few questions about their choice of aphrodisiac. The entire sexual encounter has been a letdown from the get-go, but the interruption by the annoying son ensures that nobody will be getting off tonight. In one of the film’s funniest scenes, Jules comments on the “realism” of lesbian pornography, suggesting that it isn’t erotic because the women in the film aren’t lesbians, which is, I’m assuming, a kind of joke about the film we are watching, in which two A-list straight actors are playing gay. What is so interesting about that joke is that it complicates the film’s own politics of representation (as articulated by Wolfe): Jules’ comment debunks the myth that any representation of queerness is as satisfying (sexually or otherwise) as any other.

(Headache? Great. I hate having sex with women.)

Contrast this underwhelming sex scene with the two opposite-sex sex scenes in the film. At the risk of generalizing and making normative claims about what constitutes good sex, both of the opposite-sex sex scenes—one with the Hulk and Julianne Moore, the other with the Hulk and Yaya DaCosta—are, objectively speaking, super f’ing hot. I mean, they are legit sex scenes. People are naked. People are getting off. Bodies are touching. There are noises. And rhythms. When Mark Ruffalo has sex with women, it is sweaty, passionate, multi-positioned, ass-baring, the-hills-are-alive-with-the-sound-of-heterosexuality sex; when Jules and Nic have sex, it is sad, lifeless, awkward and unsatisfying for literally everyone involved. It is unsatisfying for the women, who have a grin-and-bear it look on their faces; it is unsatisfying for the audience if they came to see cunnilingus so realistic that it would make them regret going to see the film with their parents (luckily Black Swan also came out in 2010); and it is unsatisfying for the women’s children, for whom their moms’ sexuality is a perpetual source of embarrassment: their porn, their toys, their PDA all elicit disgust from their children. And not just the typical “Ew gross my parents have sex” response, but legitimate mortification that the movie suggests feeds the children’s desire to meet their sperm donor. Their parents, according to the narrative, just aren’t enough for them—and they certainly aren’t enough for each other.

(Lesbian heartthrob, Mark Ruffalo.)

The contrast is, of course, the point. Jules and Nic are in a marriage-funk—Lesbian Bed Death and all that—thus Jules’s decision to look for new sexual thrills. I don’t think there is anything wrong with showing an unsuccessful or disappointing sexual encounter between queer women. I don’t think there is anything wrong with the fact that in a movie about queer women, the women need gay male porn to get off, or even that they desire and engage in sex with men, something to which some LGBT blogs and writers took exception (“girl, do you” pretty much sums up my philosophy on consensual sexual activity in movies or real life). But it does give one pause that a movie ostensibly about lesbians cannot imagine the possibility of satisfying sex between women, even as opposite-sex sex is portrayed as reliably orgasmic (newsflash: it ain’t). This film, which is being called the “the Lesbian Brokeback,” is organized almost entirely around the rise and fall of Mark Ruffalo’s penis. The narrative is phallocentric in much the same way as pornography featuring a male-female-female threesome (or any hetero-aimed porno) is phallocentric: the man’s penis is depicted as the most satisfying sexual toy, the most direct line to women’s pleasure. Sure, women can do some stuff to each other…but it’s basically foreplay, if it amounts to anything at all.

Further proof of the film’s phallocentrism comes from a quick search on IMDB where the plot key words listed for this film are:

Sperm | Sperm Donor | Biological Father | College | Restaurant

There is no mention of lesbians, motherhood, marital problems, or women at all. The fact that Mark Ruffalo’s character owns a goddamn restaurant seems to have more relevance than the fact that this is a movie about queer women. Moreover, the title of the film, which is the name of a Who song, emphasizes the well-being of the children—(See, gay moms can produce annoying, maladjusted and ungrateful teens, just like you!)—and deemphasizes the women who are supposedly kept “front and center.” For a movie that is being called a crowning achievement of lesbian cinema, lesbianism always seems to be not quite the point.

(They are the worst.)

Now, a movie about lesbian moms and the grown children who resulted from their insemination could, one would imagine, take on many forms. What we should be asking is: why this form? Why this story, and why this story as the one that we elevate to an enshrined place in lesbian cinema (It made the top 30 on an IMDB list of the “Best Lesbian Movies”). When critics call the depiction of lesbians “honest” what worldview has the film confirmed for them? It seems to me to confirm the lesson espoused by another “classic lesbian-themed” film, Chasing Amy—that all lesbians really want, all they really need, is sex with men. And none of this would bother me nearly as much if people didn’t talk about movies like this as “changing hearts and minds” and battling homophobia. It’s Glee-syndrome. If everyone involved in the movie—including the critics who reviewed it and the audiences who raved about it—weren’t so self-congratulatory, you might just be able to experience this as the mediocre film it is and relish in Annette Bening’s mastery of awkward tipsy dinner conversation.

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Nino Testa is a doctoral candidate in English at Tufts University, in Medford, Massachusetts. He also works at the Tufts Women’s Center and LGBT Center.

LGBTQI Week: Everything You Need to Know About Space: 10 Reasons to Watch (and Love!) ‘Imagine Me & You’

Movie poster for Imagine Me & You (2005), directed by Ol Parker

This is a guest review by Marcia Herring.

I was still a baby queer in 2005 when Imagine Me & You hit theaters in limited release. I’m sure I had recently watched Lost and Delirious, as baby queers do, and was traumatized by it, as baby queers are, but that didn’t deter me from wanting to see the star, a faux-British Piper Perabo in what looked like the cutest movie ever. I remember watching and re-watching the trailer and flailing around like Agnes in Despicable Me: SO FLUFFY I’M GONNA DIE.

It never came to the sleepy little town where I went to college, at least not on the big screen. But when I got my hands on a DVD copy, I wore that sucker out. I swooned over it in my dorm room. I screened it for the GSA. I made all my friends watch. I left it playing on repeat while I cleaned, crafted, or did homework. I still do.

Directed by Ol Parker, Imagine Me & You is a relatively by-the-book romantic comedy. It starts with a wedding, where lovely Rachel (Piper Perabo) has pre-ceremony jitters, but they’re nothing a bit of pomp and circumstance and a quick pee at McDonald’s can’t cure. Her husband-to-be is picture-perfect Heck (Matthew Goode) who is shy, stuck in a job he hates, and willing to let Rachel take the lead on just about everything. The other shoe is left dangling after the vows are vowed and Rachel meets wedding florist Luce (Lena Headey) who rescues her from a minor predicament involving the ring and a bowl of punch. As Rachel attempts to navigate married life, she keeps returning to Luce and that puzzling little detail called attraction. There. The other shoe. It goes as romantic comedies do, building to the emotional climax where after all loose ends are neatly tied with a bow. There aren’t a lot of layers to unravel, images to deconstruct, and on an objective scale, it might not be the most unique or dazzling piece of film-making. But I’m not ashamed to feature it on my movie shelf no matter how you might feel about romantic comedies, and here’s why.

Note: the following contains links to TVTropes.com (a black hole time suck), spoilers for Imagine Me & You, and spoilers for several other gay-spectrum movies & television, including…. A Single Man, Bend It Like Beckham, But I’m a Cheerleader!, Friends, Kissing Jessica Stein, Lost and Delirious, Notes on a Scandal, Sunshine Cleaning, and Whip It.

They’re just friends. Very cuddly friends.

10 – Marriage Isn’t Happily Ever After

The film realistically introduces the idea that not all women who marry men 1) stay married to them, 2) stay heterosexually identified, and 3) are happy in those marriages. I recently showed the film to a married lesbian couple, one of which had previously been in a relationship with a man. She told me it was refreshing to see that, to see her story reflected on screen. In addition to questioning her sexuality, Rachel also struggles with the expectations of her mother, and then her husband to procreate. Coop brings up the question of whether sex is better after marriage, under the expectation that it continues.

The fact is that real marriage, whether or not one of the parties involved is questioning their sexual orientation, has problems. Through Luce’s profession, we see several people, including Heck, use flowers as a kind of healing balm for the myriad troubles of life. But as Heck discovers, if something actually is wrong, flowers won’t do a damn thing.

9 – It’s Funny!

Oh, Coop. What a sad figure of arrested development. He’s played for laughs as he continues flirting with a known lesbian who, we know, will never give in to his insisting that he’s great in bed. Perhaps he even grows up a little by the end, realizing that getting involved with married folks isn’t as cut and dry as he hypothesized.

There’s Zoey, too, Luce’s sassy gay friend, there to encourage Luce to get out there and date and to point out the sexual tension between Luce and “Barbie-heterosexual” Rachel. As if we didn’t know already.

8 – Lesbian Panic

It’s nice to see a realistic example of this very real phase. After all, Rachel can’t be gay! She just got married to a man! But her denial doesn’t run so very deep (But I’m a Cheerleader!, anyone?) that she isn’t willing to at least entertain the idea. In Imagine Me & You, lesbianism isn’t treated like some disease (Friends) to distance one’s self from. Instead, Rachel tentatively examines the possibility that she might have an attraction that she had previously ignored. She even uses research – very reasonable indeed!

Of course, that doesn’t stop the panic by 20th Century Fox, which cites the same-sex romance as “shocking” on the DVD blurb.*

7 – “Older” people have sex and relationships!

While we might linger in the No Older Gays trope, the film does an excellent job of showcasing “older” romance and the stigmas that come with it. The marriage between Ned and Tessa has grown cold after the birth of their younger, “surprise” daughter. She tends toward verbal abuse and he’s, well, less than exciting. Luce’s mother Ella is on the other side of the spectrum. Depressed either because of or despite being left by Luce’s father some years ago, she expresses interest in finding a life of her own, and a frustration that it should be expected to fit into a certain box of activities appropriate for a woman her age. A “shocking” revelation comes early on – these older characters have and desire sex! – and any discomfort with the idea fades as the humanity of the characters shines through whatever preconceived notions of what a relationship should be.

6 – Lesbians Are People, Too!

While Imagine Me & You doesn’t do much to challenge the way viewers accept how women look (this, I think, isn’t the story to drive home a point about butch presentation or androgyny), it also avoids coding either female lead as lesbian. When we first meet Luce, she comes across as somewhat non-sexual. Her look is shaggy-casual, but she works as a florist!

The film also comfortably side-steps gender roles with Rachel and Heck. Rachel has a professional writing job. Heck, currently working in finance, longs to be a travel writer. Rachel is the one who cheats. Heck is the one who has an emotional breakdown. (And more about Heck in #4.)

It isn’t easy to identify Rachel or Luce as butch/femme, or even as the “man” or “woman” in the relationship.

5 – Not the End of the World

There is absolutely a time and a place for films and media that explore the times when It Doesn’t Get Better; sometimes it’s nice to see a film where coming out isn’t the end of the world. Part of the reason this works in Imagine Me & You is the relationships built between characters. I’ve been told I’m not supposed to use the Bechdel Test when dealing with lesbian movies (hah!) but I think it’s important to point out that there are several scenes between women in the film, not discussing men or the love interest – regardless of gender. The strength of cross-generation connections is one of the highlights of the film, for me. Luce has a wonderful, nuanced, and open relationship with her mother that is a delight to see on screen. This sort of story can offer hope, amusement, escapism and a relatively non-threatening introduction to lesbians for the uninitiated (in fact, I plan on showing the film to my romantic comedy-loving mom).

Of course, the film could also be accused of over-simplifying things. Rachel makes the jump to coming out as gay both quickly and without contemplating the bisexual label (which might make more sense here). But then again, Rachel doesn’t shy from coming out, neatly avoiding the assumption that she might only be gay for Luce.

4 – The Dude Is Not a Douche

While there are times when Heck’s actions and motivations slip dangerously close to that of the Nice Guy(TM), he consistently knows better and when he is behaving like an ass, he takes steps to correct it. After all, Heck is the kind of guy who dances with kids at his wedding, who stands up to his “arse” of a boss, who seems happiest when his wife is taking charge, and who — in a moment I know I connected with — is afraid to ask Rachel if something is wrong because, what if it is?

The suggestion is there, if you look for it, that the hetero-romantic comedy wedding finale isn’t the happily ever after those films would have you believe.

3 – The Stars

Taking a moment to be shallow if I may: Imagine Me & You is a really pretty film. The direction is simple, but filled with clear lines and sharp colors. And the stars aren’t bad to look at either. The supporting cast features British staple Celia Imrie (random fact: she played the first female fighter pilot in a Star Wars film!) and familiar face Anthony Head (Giles on Buffy the Vampire Slayer). Matthew Goode, who plays Heck, is no stranger to gay film, having played the dead boyfriend in A Single Man, and the not-naked dude in Watchmen (:cough:).

Then there are the leads. Piper Perabo (Coyote Ugly, Lost and Delirious, Covert Affairs) and Lena Headey (Game of Thrones, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles). Maybe it’s just me, but those acting credits speak for themselves.

2 & 1 – NO ONE DIES, ATTEMPTS MURDER OR SUICIDE, OR IS THREATENED OR THREATENING

So yeah. There’s that.

If you haven’t seen Imagine Me & You, you really should. It never fails to leave me with a smile on my face, and no one I’ve ever shown it to has hated it. That’s not a bad batting average.

*I took a quick look at the other films 20th Century Fox imprint Fox Searchlight has to offer and found what might be a coincidence, but also looks a little suspicious. Of the women-centric/lesbian-oriented films under the Fox Searchlight banner, almost all were problematic:

Sunshine Cleaning‘s lesbian scene fell victim to the cutting-room floor
Whip It‘s Ari Graynor cited difficulties in getting roller derby’s queer culture on screen
Notes on a Scandal features a psycho lesbian
Bend It Like Beckham was originally written as a lesbian romance
and feelings about Kissing Jessica Stein range from delight to horror

This is hardly definitive research, but it makes me think harder about Imagine Me & You‘s final scenes. The implication is that Coop and Heck both have sexual happy endings (a child, an in-flight romance) while Rachel and Luce don’t even get to finish the movie with a kiss.

The film is also rated R by the MPAA, something I question because two “fucks,” a few “arses,” and zero nudity hardly adds up to something I wouldn’t allow a 17 year old to see. Even with some sexual discussion and two — count ’em, two — lesbian kisses!

———-

Marcia Herring is a writer from Missouri. She is still working on her graduate degree, but swears to have it done someday. She spends most of her time watching television and movies and wishes she could listen to music and read while doing so without going insane. She previously contributed an analysis of Degrassi, Teens, and Rape Apologism and a piece for the Best Picture Nominee Series on Atonement, and a review of X-Men First Class.

LGBTQI Week: I Need a Hero: Gus Van Sant’s ‘Milk’

Movie poster for Milk

This guest review by Drew Patrick Shannon previously appeared at Bitch Flicks on September 21, 2011.

“My name is Harvey Milk, and I’m here to recruit you,” yells a nearly unrecognizable Sean Penn in a pivotal scene in Gus Van Sant’s biopic Milk (2008). Wearing a tight red and white shirt and form-fitting slacks highlighting a noticeable bulge, Penn unnervingly inhabits the body of a man who was never handsome, never pretty, but who exuded an eye-twinkling sexiness which led numbers of attractive young men into his bed. It’s a transformation that is not merely surface, not merely costume and hairstyle and what appears to be a slight prosthesis on the nose: like Nicole Kidman’s portrayal of Virginia Woolf in The Hours, this is a full-bodied immersion in a character. Penn, always something of a chameleon in recent years, loses all traces of his own physicality, and portrays Harvey Milk with a buoyancy, a loose-limbed lightness that I’ve never seen in him before. The process seems to have liberated him as an actor—he’s behaving with an unbridled exuberance. His co-star, James Franco, reported that after their first kissing scene, Penn called up ex-wife Madonna and said, “I’ve just kissed my first man,” to which Madonna replied, “Honey, I’m so proud of you.” So are we.

In a recent piece on the Criterion Collection edition of the Oscar-winning 1984 documentary The Times of Harvey Milk (directed by Rob Epstein, later to direct The Celluloid Closet and Paragraph 175), photographer Daniel Nicoletta calls the documentary “Harvey Milk 101.” It would be fair to call Van Sant’s Milk “Harvey Milk 102”—the two films, viewed in order, represent a progression in the course sequence, but they’re primers, neither qualifying you for an advanced degree in the subject. For that, one must turn to the late Randy Shilts’s book The Mayor of Castro Street: The Life and Times of Harvey Milk (1983), which, to my mind, remains the definitive work on the man’s life and legacy. The Epstein documentary is primarily concerned with Milk’s political career; the Van Sant biopic fills in many of the biographical holes in the documentary and concentrates more on Milk’s personal life and relationships. My suggestion is that viewers watch both films—Times first, Milk second—and, if they yearn for more, to then turn to the Shilts book.

Milk begins with archival footage of police raids on gay bars in the 1950s and 60s, and is followed by Milk in 1977 reading his will into a tape recorder: he was convinced that he would soon be assassinated, a prediction that would shortly come true. Flash back to 1970, and Milk’s meeting with Scott Smith (Franco) in a New York subway, and the beginning of an on-again, off-again romance that would last the rest of Milk’s life. Dissatisfied with his grinding corporate-America job in New York, Milk moves with Smith to San Francisco in search of liberation and meaning. He opens a camera shop, becomes an exceedingly groovy bohemian, and ultimately becomes involved with gay rights and local politics, culminating in his election as a city supervisor—the first openly gay elected official in the United States. He is helped along the way by Smith and a band of friends and lovers who operate out of his camera store: Cleve Jones (Emile Hirsch), Jack Lira (Diego Luna), Anne Kronenberg (Alison Pill), and Dick Pabich (Joseph Cross). Once elected, he finds a staunch ally in Mayor George Moscone (Victor Garber) and a nemesis in Supervisor Dan White (Josh Brolin). White, after a series of public humiliations, assassinates Milk and Moscone in City Hall (Dianne Feinstein’s famous announcement of the event appears in the film), and later pleads insanity by using the notorious “Twinkie defense.”

More than a mere summary of events, Milk seeks to illuminate some of the depths of Milk’s character, which are left mostly untouched by The Times of Harvey Milk. And Penn’s performance is a marvel. But I’m left at the end of the film still not entirely knowing what made this man tick. I’m slightly in awe of him, I’m humbled by his passion, I’m drawn to his politics, I’m certainly attracted to him and can easily see myself getting talked into bed by him without much effort, but I still feel separate from him, as though his core has not been exposed. Perhaps this is more than a biopic can do, but my sense is that this is the film’s goal, and on that count it doesn’t quite deliver. The fault is neither Penn’s nor Van Sant’s nor the script’s—my guess is that capturing someone as mercurial as Harvey Milk on film is an impossibility.

Lest this sound as though I didn’t enjoy the film, let me hasten to add that Milk brilliantly recreates a period when gay sex was fun and free and easy and the specter of AIDS was a few years in the future. The cast looks resplendent in its period costumes; it’s alarming that clothes I once wore as a child now constitute “period attire.” And, apart from Penn, the cast is uniformly superb, as we might expect from Van Sant, who, after all, delivered amazing performances from the non-acting teens in 2003’s Elephant. James Franco demonstrates the fearlessness that led him shortly thereafter to take on the role of poet Allen Ginsberg in Howl, and proves why he’s one of his generation’s most interesting actors; his Scott Smith is sweet, sexy, charming, and loyal. Josh Brolin has the incredibly tough job of making Dan White a human being rather than the boogeyman of the piece. He looks uncannily like the real man, and he manages to imbue White with enough pathos that I was unable to hate him, or not entirely. Victor Garber is reliable as always as Moscone, and Diego Luna and Joseph Cross (the little boy from Northern Lights, with Diane Keaton) excel as bits of eye candy on the fringes of Milk’s world. Emile Hirsch has the gravitas to play the great Cleve Jones, whose activism continues to inspire today, and Alison Pill holds her own as the sole woman in this sea of gay men.

What struck me most about Milk at the time of its release was its celebration of the writer. The trailer proudly announced “Written by Dustin Lance Black” in huge blue letters, and the very fetching Mr. Black won a well-deserved Oscar for his efforts. His Academy Award speech, in which he pleaded for the acceptance of young gay men like himself, is already legendary, and in interviews with magazines like The Advocate, he chronicled his difficulties in getting the script written and his exhaustive research. Perhaps the best thing about his script is that it doesn’t venerate its subject: it would have been all too easy to turn Harvey Milk into a saintly angel in America, but he is instead presented by turns as charming and irritating, pleasant and cantankerous, open-minded and bull-headed. And despite the opening which announces his death, the film doesn’t belabor this inevitable trajectory: the focus of both the film and the characters is on the moment, or on a rosy future. Again, the film’s only flaw, to my mind, is that Milk still seems at arm’s length from me, and I craved a more intimate relationship with him. But perhaps this is the point.

I’m bothered by one last thing, completely apart from the film itself. In his bravura acceptance speech for Best Actor at the Oscars, Sean Penn drolly called the audience “You Commie, homo-loving sons of guns.” Perhaps, but we’re still dealing here with a film with a gay hero who dies. Is it significant that two other actors to have won Best Actor Oscars for playing gay men—William Hurt in Kiss of the Spider Woman (1985) and Tom Hanks in Philadelphia (1993)—were killed off by gunfire and AIDS? As producer Jan Oxenberg remarks in Rob Epstein’s The Celluloid Closet, it remains to be seen whether or not Hollywood will embrace—and indeed, deem worthy of an Oscar—a gay character who lives.

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Drew Patrick Shannon received his Ph.D. in English from the University of Cincinnati, and currently teaches 19th and 20th century British literature at the College of Mount St. Joseph. He is at work on a novel and on a non-fiction book examining the diary of Virginia Woolf. He contributed a review of the 1986 film, Working Girls, to Bitch Flicks, which appeared in a previous version on his blog, atleswoolf.

LGBTQI Week: Transamerica

This is a guest review by Stephen Ira.

“I got a phone call last night from a juvenile inmate of the New York prison system. He claimed to be Stanley’s son,” the trans woman explains, trying her best to articulate herself to her therapist. It’s hard to talk about her life in her assigned gender, because it was such a painful and traumatic time, and it’s doubly hard to articulate herself to her cis therapist, practitioner of a profession that’s been pathologizing trans experiences as long as it’s been talking about them.

“No third person,” says the cis therapist paternally, jumping to her role, which is of course to moderate the way that the trans woman experiences her gendered self.

“My son,” the trans woman agrees, because she is a good trans woman, one which the audience is supposed to respect and admire, except wait–isn’t that Felicity Huffman, who is totally not a trans woman at all? Psyche! You’re watching Transamerica, and director Duncan “wow, trans women really don’t look like Daniel Day Lewis in a dress?!?” Tucker is about to teach all you trans women in the audience how you need to behave in order to become a real woman!

Cissexist ideas are built into the structure of Transamerica. I’ve criticized the trope of the “journey” before in cis narratives of trans lives–cis people love to tell us about our trans “journey.” They love asking how it’s going, telling us how much they support us in it, that whole party line. Now, this movie is literally about a woman going on a cross country road trip so that she can get bottom surgery–and thus, within the film’s cissexist logic, become a “real woman.” She has to do this because she’s got a kid from an affair back when she was still presenting as male, and in order to satisfy her therapist that she’s ready to get surgery, she needs to deposit this kid on the West Coast.

You don’t really have to watch this movie to know it’s going to be a real winner. Just read an interview with the director, then imagine what kind of movie a guy like this would make about a trans woman. He pulls out gems like, “I did a lot of research on transgender women, and most of them don’t look like guys in dresses.” Better yet, that quote is a response to a common query: why on earth cast Felicity Huffman? After all, Calpernia Addams appears in a brief scene, along with a couple of other transgender actresses. Why not cast Calpernia? It’s a mystery. Tucker puts forth that he did his “due diligence” upon discovering that there were “a couple transgender actresses in Hollywood”–what a shock. He also insists that the “couple of transgender actresses” he found “were closeted.” Considering that out transgender actress Calpernia Addams is clearly out, transgender, and in fact in his movie, the mind of Duncan Tucker is simply not to be understood. I will not try. Instead, let’s talk about the real reason Felicity Huffman plays this role.

Tucker says he was looking for “someone who could do stealth–not someone who was going to look like a guy in a dress. . .someone you look at and say, ‘She could be a woman.'” In the context of his casting choice, this quote becomes a kind of post-structuralist gender theory slapstick. Tucker cast a woman, because he was looking for someone who looked like they could be a woman? De Beauvoir called. She wants her famous quotation back. He cast a cis woman specifically, because clearly in this logic, trans women don’t look like they could be women. Or they’re in such deep stealth that they would never want to play a trans woman. The fact that both of these possibilities are disproved by the presence of Calpernia Addams in the film again seems to bother Tucker not at all–after all, he needn’t pay attention to the trans bodies already in the world when he has trans bodies of his own to construct.

Huffman was cast so that Tucker could make her into the transsexual he wanted. He needed a woman, because he is telling a heartwarming story about how Bree–the trans character–turns out to be really a woman after all. Paradoxically, Tucker needs a cis woman, because cis women are the only valid women, to play a trans woman in a movie in which trans women are proved to be valid women. In a story where we’re accepted, our bodies can’t be seen. Only a false version of a transsexual can be accepted, a parody. Tucker’s poisonous brand of “acceptance” cancels our bodies out.

Before Huffman can look plausibly trans, she has to be uglified, and that uglification interests me. The trouble with casting an actual trans person is that we don’t necessarily look like what Tucker has decided he needs a transsexual to look like, but a cis person–Tucker can make her look as hideous as he likes, all in the name of realism! When Transamerica came out in 2005, you may remember how much of the press revolved around the character’s ugliness. Felicity Huffman laughed about how deprecating it was to have to wear all that ugly makeup in interview after interview. In character, she’s caked with goop designed to make her look “trans,” a word which here means, “a little bit manly and a lot aesthetically unpleasant.” In the best example of the film’s “Come See Our Movie About a Hideous Transsexual” school of publicity, the US DVD cover is holographic: tilt it one way, and you have Huffman looking red carpet ready, but tilt it the other and you have her as she appears in the film, frumpy and square-jawed. (Memo for your edification: trans women are frumpy. Duncan Tucker told me.)

DVD cover for Transamerica

This gimmick mystifies me–what’s it trying to say? That at the beginning of the movie Bree looks one way, but at the end she transforms from an ugly duckling into a beautiful swan? Because she doesn’t. At the film’s end, she looks more or less the same, which in itself contradicts the rest of the film’s logic. According to the cis concept of how surgery works, one is not a real woman before and is a real woman afterward. Transamerica supports this narrative in which a trans woman goes under the knife and comes out a different person–Bree’s whole raison d’être is obtaining surgery, and at one point she actually says, and I quote, “Jesus made me this way so I could suffer and be reborn the way he wanted me.”

Sure, at that point she’s pretending to be a missionary, which she really isn’t–this movie’s plot is just as much a gem of shit as the rest of it–but Huffman acts so goddamn much in the scene that we’re clearly supposed to assign a measure of emotional reality to the moment. But after her surgery, there Bree is, looking the same, and not reborn at all, because the film also has to fulfill the cissexist belief that trans people are irretrievably trans, irretrievably ugly, even if we don’t look like Daniel Day Lewis in a dress. The Daniel Day Lewis in a dress comparison, by the way, is an actual Tucker original.

There’s only one major difference between Bree pre-surgery and Bree post-surgery, actually: now she’s fit for the public cis eye. We see Bree at work at the beginning of the film in back of a restaurant washing dishes, and by the end, she’s moved up to waitressing. She even talks to some people! Which is a relief, because it’s established early on that Bree’s only connection with humankind is that horrible cis therapist I mentioned before. Where are that woman’s ethics, anyway? When did it become proper practice to require a trans woman to take her son on a road trip before you write her a surgery letter? I don’t know; I wish I could say I found this part of the movie implausible, but cis people, you never know. The point is that before her surgery, Bree is too hideous to go out in public and make connections, but at least bottom surgery changes that. THANK GOD.

As trans women invariably are when they aren’t fetishized, Bree is desexualized. In the whole film, we see her flirt once, schoolgirlishly–which is fitting with the style of dress the filmmaker has given her. Said style entails a wardrobe like a sixteen-year-old Mennonite who has just left the church and discovered the color lavender, and is milking her newfound glory for all it’s worth. I have never seen a trans woman who dresses like this. I have never seen a cis woman who dresses like this. According to an interview with Huffman, it’s because Bree orders her clothes from catalogues rather than buying them in shops, because as we all know trans women are unable to buy clothes in public? I’m joking–obviously this is an issue trans women face, but I have yet to meet one who dealt with it by dressing like a cross between a nun and the original 1950s Barbies. By the way, it’s heavily implied that she’ll be able to go back to the man she flirts with after surgery and have a Real Relationship at last. This is because if trans people attempt to have a romantic relationship without getting bottom surgery, we combust.

You know Julia Serano’s seminal trans feminist text, Whipping Girl? You know those machines from cartoons where they’d put the good guy in and the evil version of him would come out? Transamerica is what you get when you put Whipping Girl into one of those machines. In her book, Serano talks about the scenes in media featuring trans women where the trans women put on makeup, clothes, breast forms, and how those scenes exist to remind cis people that trans women are not “real.” Well, Transamerica fulfills its Trans Woman Putting on Lipstick Quota within the first twenty minutes, so you know this is a quality production.

Seriously, this is one of the most misogynistic films I have ever seen: over and over, we see Bree reduced to her body. And what can be more misogynistic than a woman reduced to her body? At one point we even see how damn irrational that womanly estrogen is making her! It’s spotlit in the dialogue, so you can be sure. I’m not sure if all the readers here have encountered the word transmisogyny before, but it is vital vocabulary, and it’s exactly what this movie is riddled with. Transmisogyny is misogyny that’s directed towards trans women, specifically predicated upon their trans status. Trans women experience garden variety misogyny as well, but transmisogyny is specific. When we decide that a woman has to have a certain type of genitalia in order to be acceptable for public view and human relationships, that’s transmisogyny. When we decide that trans women have to enact 50s Mennonite Barbie gender roles in order to look like women, that’s transmisogyny. When we support transmisogyny, we support misogyny; transphobia is a tool of patriarchy. Gee, it sure is nice up here on this soapbox–I’ll just recommend some blogs that get this on the nose and carry on talking about the movie.

At some point in the movie, there is a plot. It seems to involve a mother/son relationship. Kevin Zegers does a good job as the gigolo son, presumably by spending the entire shoot pretending that he’s playing a disaffected hustler in My Own Private Idaho and not this disaster. Kevin Zegers is also SUPER hot, and his beauty combined with his performance makes him the best part of the movie except for Dolly Parton’s theme tune, “Travellin’ Thru,” which is a song by Dolly Parton and thus flawless by nature.

I do not recommend this film. If you feel you must consume it in some capacity, may I suggest distilling the essential elements of the experience? Call up the most transmisogynistic person you know and have them talk to you about what they think bottom surgery signifies. While they talk, look at pictures of Kevin Zegers looking wounded and hot, and listen to “Travellin’ Thru” in one headphone. All of the Transamerica with none of the hassle!

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Stephen Ira is a trans femme-inist poet and activist. He has poems forthcoming in EOAGH and Specter Magazine and short fiction forthcoming in The Collection from Topside Press. He blogs about politics at Super Mattachine on WordPress.

LGBTQI Week: Trans Girls and ‘Gun Hill Road’: Marking International Women’s Day For All Girls

This guest post by Ileana Jiménez originally appeared at Feminist Teacher as part of Blog for International Women’s Day (hosted by Gender Across Borders) and is cross-posted with permission.

Movie poster for Gun Hill Road

Trans girls of color need to be a part of how we mark International Women’s Day, especially in a year when the theme is “Connecting Girls, Inspiring Futures.” Often absent from our discussions about girls’ education and girls’ empowerment programs, trans girls remain invisible to our re-imagining of a dynamic and inclusive future for all girls.That’s why today I screened the film Gun Hill Road (2011) for my high school students taking my LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) literature and film class. Winner of the Best Acting Ensemble Award at the Ashland Independent Film Awards, Gun Hill Road features the story of a Puerto Rican family in the Bronx whose patriarch, Enrique, returns from prison only to learn gradually that his son, Michael, now identifies as a young woman, Vanessa.

As a queer teacher of color, I personally feel a responsibility to bring a range of narratives about the LGBT experience, especially those that have an intersectional lens of race, class, gender, ethnicity, and sexuality, to my students, who themselves acknowledge that the queer images they see in the media are too often of white, upper middle class Will & Grace types. For me, screening a film about a young Puerto Rican trans girl is imperative for teaching students that we need to disrupt mainstream narratives of what it means to be queer, young, and of color in today’s transphobic, misogynistic, and racist world.

In addition to illustrating the struggle between Vanessa and her father, the film offers opportunities for educators to have important conversations about gender and sexual identity and bullying in schools. In one locker room scene, Vanessa is taunted by her peers both in Spanish and English, where phrases like “metemelo” (put it in me) and “don’t forget your panties” are hurled. Scenes such as these should give educators the opportunity to discuss important issues such as sexism, misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia.

Indeed, according to GLSEN’s (Gay, Lesbian, Straight Educator’s Network) 2009 climate survey: “90% of transgender students heard derogatory remarks, such as ‘dyke’ or ‘faggot,’ sometimes, often, or frequently in school in the past year.”

Educators should also note scenes related to discussing bathroom accommodations for transgender youth as well as safe sex practices for all queer youth.

As part of the screening, Rashaad Green, the director of the film, also came to speak to my class. When asked what his goal was in portraying the life of a trans girl, Green responded:

It’s not necessarily a coming out story. I think when we meet Vanessa, we meet somebody who is pretty realized in her own journey. She can’t be who she wants to completely to her own family. But she knows who she is.

I found this sense of self-actualization to be true in the scenes where Vanessa performs spoken word. In one scene, her poetry reveals not only her need for her father’s acceptance but also her desire to be seen as she truly is: “I’m begging right here for you to see me . . . see me.”My student Aaron said that he found Vanessa’s transformation on stage as a transgender poet important for understanding her character:

To see her change out of her clothes, recite her poetry, and completely bare her soul was powerful.

Rashaad was impressed with my students’ overall reaction to the film: “The masses aren’t as progressive as say, this school is. At other schools, I’ve had to preface the material, they aren’t necessarily ready to accept Michael’s transition.”While it may be true that not all schools are progressive as the school where I teach, it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t work hard towards creating safe spaces where these discussions can be had for students and teachers in all settings. If we really want to create schools that allow students to learn without fear and anxiety as well as support families that are accepting of all our children, then Gun Hill Road certainly provides an excellent starting point to create those spaces not just today on International Women’s Day but throughout the entire year.

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Ileana Jiménez has been a leader in the field of social justice education for fifteen years. A recipient of the Distinguished Fulbright Award in Teaching, her research in Mexico City focused on creating safe schools for LGBT youth. A high school teacher in New York, she is the founder and sole blogger at feministteacher.com. She tweets at @feministteacher

LGBTQI Week: Revisiting ‘Desert Hearts’

This is a guest review by Angie Beauchamp.

We all hold dear particular films that made an indelible impression on us. Somehow they connected to us as a viewer on an emotional or even a spiritual level; we identified with the story or characters in unusual ways; or we appreciated the craftsmanship so much that we could recite lines or remember the sequence of shots and all of the details in a scene. That ability to touch individuals while also reaching very large groups of viewers is part of what makes film such a powerful medium.

DVD cover image of Desert Hearts

Desert Hearts is one such film for me. In the fall of 1986, still a kid of 22 who had just moved to the city from Podunk, Indiana, I went to the theater in a Boston suburb. There I remember looking around at the audience. I had a hard time believing that I was watching a lesbian romance film in a public place. I don’t think I breathed during the love scene. For the first time in my life, in a mainstream movie theater, I watched a film that gave me a model for what love could be. It made me want to fall in love, to find my own Cay or Vivian and hop on the train to start a life together.

For heterosexual women, the movies and television show them every day what a loving relationship is and what the expectations are to grow up, fall in love, and find a handsome prince (however flawed that may be). For lesbians prior to Donna Deitch’s Desert Hearts, nothing of the kind existed on screen. We relied on romance novels from mail order houses like Naiad Press and feminist bookstores if we were lucky enough to live in a large college town or progressive city. Desert Hearts had a limited distribution (i.e. it was not shown in Podunk, Indiana), but it did find an unheard of large audience on screens across the country and abroad.

It is a conventional romance, which is one of the reasons that it is so successful. As Jackie Stacey points out, “it uses the iconography of romance films: train stations, sunsets and sunrises, close-up shots, rain-drenched kisses, lakeside confessions, ‘I’ve never felt this way before’ orgasms.” It is those Hollywood conventions that conjure up shared memories of hundreds of heterosexual romances. Thus the filmmaker uses what are sometimes clichés as shortcuts to elicit particular emotions and reactions from the audience. Although the world of 1959 would certainly have been more challenging for these two lovers in the real world, the cinematic world Deitch created signals that there is an all-important happy ending coming up, a romantic Hollywood ending.

Deitch’s use of music also contributes to the romance convention. The country songs of Patsy Cline, Jim Reeves and Johnny Cash are very emotionally evocative. In particular, they conjure up a feeling of wanting that comes from knowing the themes and voices that accompany these artists’ work. The soundtrack, which took up a large portion of the film’s budget, makes brilliant use of the audience’s previous knowledge. We know how we should feel before the scene plays itself out.

Cay and Vivian in Desert Hearts

Placing the film’s setting in Reno also taps into our shared impressions of the West from movies and popular culture. It is a place in which one can start a new life and throw caution to the wind. The chances for romance certainly would not have felt so hopeful without the wide open spaces and bright, beautiful colors of the Nevada desert. Cay’s cowboy boots and western clothes make her the equivalent of the cowboy who sweeps the newcomer to town off of her feet. It’s the wild westerner who charms the shy school marm, just like we’ve seen a million times in the movies.

Others (like Mandy Merck) discuss Desert Hearts as conventional, criticizing it for not being challenging enough, not tackling issues of lesbian identity, for example. For me, that criticism totally misses the point. Deitch intentionally did not make an issues kind of film. She took Hollywood formula and tilted it on its ear, creating a lesbian love story that audiences still crave today.

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Angie Beauchamp is a freelance internet marketer, making her living by managing other people’s blogs and social media. She also runs the Lesbian Film Review.

LGBTQI Week: Frida

This review by Editor and Co-Founder Amber Leab previously appeared at Bitch Flicks on March 30, 2012.

Frida (2002)

I’ll confess to being a little bit obsessed with Frida Kahlo. A copy of her journals sits on my bookshelf. A postcard of one of her numerous self portraits gazes at me from a bedroom wall. A quote from the movie about her life made an appearance in my wedding ceremony. Hell, I even named my dog “Kahlo.” Personal bias notwithstanding, I love the film Frida, for a myriad of reasons.

In my opinion, biopic is an extremely difficult genre. A person’s life doesn’t fit the narrative arc of a standard movie, so we typically see parts of a person’s life excised, heteronormative relationships emphasized, and vast simplification of an often-famous personality. The best biopics play with the narrative arc, bring in some element of creativity, and allow formal aspects of the film to reflect the subject’s personality. Frida does a good job at this by incorporating surrealism—a reflection of Kahlo’s work—and skipping most of the first eighteen years of her life, in favor of beginning near her artistic awakening. (Two other biopics that also subvert standard moviemaking immediately come to mind: Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus, about art photographer Diane Arbus, and Beyond the Sea, which looks at the life of singer and entertainer Bobby Darin).

In identity politics terms, Frida tells the story of a disabled bisexual socialist woman of color who became one of Mexico’s most famous painters. That description alone tells you that this isn’t standard fare that the Hollywood machine typically churns out. The film is a decade-in-the-making labor of love for lead actress Salma Hayek, directed by Julie Taymor, and also starring Alfred Molina (as Diego Rivera, fellow painter and husband to Frida), with cameos by Ashely Judd (playing friend, political ally, and photographer Tina Modotti) and Edward Norton (playing Nelson Rockefeller; Norton is also said to be an uncredited writer of the script, and quite a bit of controversy about his role in the making and editing of the film sprung up when he and Hayek ended their romantic relationship).

There is much to admire about Frida as a film, and Kahlo as an artist, for that matter. Although Frida Kahlo was prettied up by the gorgeous Hayek, who did sport Kahlo’s signature unibrow and unbleached/unwaxed moustache, slightly de-emphasized, the difficulties of her life certainly weren’t softened. When Kahlo was six, she contracted polio, which left her with physical difficulties into adulthood. When she was eighteen, she was in a terrible bus accident, leaving her with life-long debilitating pain which required numerous surgeries to resolve (and resolve they never did). The scene below begins with an unconscious Kahlo, immediately following the accident, and takes us through a Day-of-the-Dead-inspired montage of her three weeks in the hospital, until she regained consciousness (warning: the opening image is bloody and disturbing):

Calaca Hospital
Frida — MOVIECLIPS.com

The film isn’t just about living with disability, though; it’s about thriving in spite of it, about having a full life in which disability is only a part. Kahlo does not “overcome” her physical problems; she spends a lot of time painting in bed, she has good times and bad, and all of this she channels into her work. As a person who lives with disability, it’s damn near inspiring to see a character–based on a real-life person–who struggles and who achieves great things. And great things Kahlo did achieve. Her body of work includes 143 paintings, 55 of which are self portraits. One of her paintings was the first work by a 20th century Mexican artist to be purchased by the Louvre in Paris, she had a one-woman show in Paris, and has become significantly more famous since her death in 1958. Her work is intensely personal, representing most often pain and the broken self. Not only is this work autobiographical–depicting her own pain and suffering–but it is also overtly feminist. Kahlo painting herself in surrealistic representations of womanhood and pain legitimizes female experiences as worthy of high art. Like so many culturally valued enterprises (filmmaking, for one), men tend to dominate the art world. Kahlo–and the film Frida–challenges those patriarchal norms.

Le due Frida

While the film certainly highlights her work as the central element of her life, romantic relationships play a major role as well. Kahlo married the older and more established Mexican muralist, Diego Rivera, when she was 21, and they had a tumultuous relationship, divorcing and remarrying, and having plenty of extra-marital affairs. Their marriage, though, is a kind of model of an artistic pairing; both understanding the other’s devotion to painting and belief in “marriage without fidelity.” Kahlo is known to have had affairs with both men and women, and the film doesn’t gloss over her bisexuality, including a scene with a woman who both Kahlo and Rivera had been sexually involved with. Early indication in the film of her admiration of men and women comes in a somewhat playful party scene, in which Kahlo steps in and wins a drinking contest between Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros (played by Antonio Banderas) with the prize of a dance with the lovely Modotti (Judd). The super-sexy tango the two women dance is shown below:

Frida and Tina Tango
Frida — MOVIECLIPS.com

The film, like so many, isn’t without its flaws; one could argue the problem of having a major motion picture about one of Mexico’s most famous artists in which the characters all speak English, for example. Since ten years have passed since the film was made, I can’t be sure whether the same would be true today. Problems aside, this is a visually stunning film, made by a woman, about a woman, and it’s remarkable in nearly every way. If you haven’t seen it, what are you waiting for?

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Amber Leab is a writer living in Asheville, North Carolina. She holds a Master’s degree in English & Comparative Literature from the University of Cincinnati and a Bachelor’s degree in English Literature & Creative Writing from Miami University. Outside of Bitch Flicks, her work has appeared in The Georgetown Review, on the blogs Shakesville, Opinioness of the World, and I Will Not Diet, and at True Theatre.

LGBTQI Week: The Kids Are All Right

Movie poster for The Kids Are All Right

This review by Staff Writer Megan Kearns previously appeared at Bitch Flicks on February 21, 2011.

I was so excited to see The Kids Are All Right. I mean a film with not one, but two amazing female leads as well as a family headed by lesbian parents?? The feminist in me says sign me up! While it exuded potential, I wasn’t so excited after watching the film.

The Kids Are All Right, directed and co-written by Lisa Cholodenko (Laurel Canyon, High Art) centers on Annette Bening (Nic) and Julianne Moore (Jules), a loving married lesbian couple in California who are parents to daughter Joni and son Laser. Joni is a brilliant student about to embark on college; Laser is a confused teen experimenting with drugs and yearning for a male role model. Laser begs Joni, as she’s 18, to contact their “father,” as both their mothers underwent artificial insemination, Mark Ruffalo (Paul) who happens to be the sperm donor for both kids. When Joni and Laser meet Paul, they’re reticent to tell their mothers. Yet they eventually do all meet. While Jules and Joni are pleased to connect with him, Laser feels ambivalence towards him and Nic worries Paul’s arrival will drive a wedge between her and her family. Complications ensue as Paul becomes ever more entwined in each of their lives.

This slow-paced, meandering film possesses some positive traits. The performances, particularly by Bening and Ruffalo, are where the film shines. Bening radiates as the rigid and controlling career woman who feels her world spinning out of control. There’s a beautiful scene, one of my faves in the film, in which the background sounds of a dinner party fade to a muffled din as she sits, alone in her pain. Bening perfectly conveys Nic’s frustrations and emotions. Moore, whom I adore for her chameleon ability to seamlessly meld into a character (except her horrendous Boston accent on 30 Rock), while far from her best performance, does a great job as the flighty free spirit who’s never truly found her calling in life. Josh Hutcherson who plays Laser is annoying; although teens often are so perhaps he does succeed! Mia Wasikowska as Joni gives a solid performance as the teen yearning for freedom. Ruffalo is fantastic as Paul, the well-intentioned yet fuck-up hipster. He’s a pathetic character yet oozes charm in every scene, as he strives to find a meaningful connection. But it’s Nic and Jules’ tender yet struggling relationship, that elicits the most fascination. With its mix of bickering and affection, it feels so real. Just as any couple has problems, so do they. Jules feels she’s not desired anymore and Nic feels her family slipping through her grasp.

The dialogue is sharp and witty yet problematic. For what I had hoped would be a feminist film, the script was littered with assloads of slut-shaming, whore-calling and homophobic F-word dropping. And while these terms do get tossed around in our society, no repercussions or backlash existed in the film; as if no social commentary was being made. Granted, not every film has to make some grandiose statement. Yet I expected better here, particularly as it was directed and co-written by a woman. Luckily, it does pass the Bechdel Test as Nic and Jules often talk to each other about their marriage or about their children.

Despite the great performances and (mostly) great dialogue, the film was mired with too many problems…particularly its plot. If you’ve seen The Kids Are All Right or read about it, you probably know what I’m talking about: the affair. One of the women enters into an affair…with Paul. Yep, a lesbian has an affair with a man. But not just any man…her sperm donor!

As someone who doesn’t consider themselves straight (but not a lesbian either), I truly believe in the fluidity of gender and sexuality. I don’t believe in gender binaries, so I don’t feel that a self-professed lesbian sleeping with a man means she’s either/or: either a lesbian or straight. Nor do I think it necessarily makes her bisexual. But why oh christ why did a man have to be involved?? As it is, according to the Women’s Media Center, men comprise more than 70% of the speaking roles in films. And while we’re starting to see gay men and couples in films and on TV shows, it’s even rarer to see lesbians (as well as bisexual and transgender).

So it pissed me off that a lesbian couple, shown with so much tenderness and depth, had to have their lives invaded by a man. Even the porn film Nic and Jules watch during a sex scene is of two gay men. It’s almost as if Cholodenko is saying all women crave a penis! Perhaps I wouldn’t be so hard on the film if there were more movies made about lesbians. But as this is one of the few films to show a lesbian marriage, I worry that people will judge lesbian relationships based on how they’re depicted here.

Inspiration for the film came loosely from Cholodenko’s life, who came out as a lesbian when she was 16 years old. As an adult, many of her lesbian friends were having babies via sperm donors. When Cholodenko and her wife decided to have a baby, they too sought a sperm donor. Interestingly, co-writer Stuart Blumberg happened to donate sperm in college. These two circumstances coalesced, forming the foundation for the film. Cholodenko also infused the script with anecdotes from her own life, such as the “numb tongue” story of how Jules and Nic meet in the film.

Cholodenko told the LA Times,

“‘That Nic and Jules are a lesbian couple is important to the movie thematically because they are raising a family in an unconventional setting and are more anxious than some parents about how having two moms will affect the mental health of their children. But it could have been the same thing with a divorced couple,’ she says. ‘I always thought we were making a movie about a family, and the threat to the wholeness of the family. It was not about politics. If there was anything calculated, it was how do we make this movie universal — how do we make this a story about a family?'”

Critics have lauded the film for its transcendence from an LGBTQ family into a universal tale about modern families. And that’s one of the components I applaud; that Cholodenko’s message is not about a lesbian family, but of a family, period. Yet I can’t escape the feeling of unease, that critics glossing over the unique experiences and challenges that LGBTQ parents face feels like a slap in the face at worst and negligent at best.

While critics and many movie-goers loved The Kids Are All Right, the film infuriated many lesbians due to the affair. And I can’t blame them, it pissed me off too. Sheila Lambert at the Examiner writes,

“‘Lesbians love it when a married woman has an affair with another woman on film, which is perceived as moving toward authenticity, but we’re not happy seeing a woman in a same-sex marriage have an affair with a man, which to them represents a regression. And raises concerns about whether it adds fuel to the notion that sexual orientation can be changed from gay to straight. Sitting in the audience, I found myself feeling concerned about that as well…'”

Professor Joan Garry at Huffington Post was one of the lesbians angered by the film’s plot. She astutely argues,

“‘It boils down to this: I’m upset because I believe the takeaway from this film will be that lesbians and the families they create need men to be complete.'”

Our patriarchal society continually tells women that they need a man; that their lives aren’t whole or fulfilled without one. But they don’t. Despite the film’s misguided plot, the crux of the film resides in the strength of Nic and Jules’ relationship and their love for their kids. My fave scene and quote in the film is when Nic and Jules attempt to explain to their kids why families fight. Jules says,

“‘Your mom and I are in hell right now and the bottom line is marriage is hard. It’s really fucking hard. Just two people slogging through the shit, year after year, getting older, changing. It’s a fucking marathon, okay? So, sometimes, you know, you’re together for so long, that you just… You stop seeing the other person. You just see weird projections of your own junk. Instead of talking to each other, you go off the rails and act grubby and make stupid choices, which is what I did. And I feel sick about it because I love you guys, and your mom, and that’s the truth. And sometimes you hurt the ones you love the most, and I don’t know why. You know if I read more Russian novels, then…Anyway…I just wanted to say how sorry I am for what I did. I hope you’ll forgive me eventually…'”

Raw and real; it felt as if Annette Bening and Julianne Moore were a real couple fighting to hold onto their family. Usually, you see a film with two lesbians in an affair for men’s titillation, rarely to convey a loving, monogamous relationship. Nic and Jules share a flawed yet devoted marriage, evocative of relationships in real-life. There was simply no need to bring a man into the picture. I wish the film had retained its focus on the couple and their family. It’s such a rarity that we see films featuring lesbian couples let alone two female leads that I had high hopes for, expecting it to be empowering. Sadly, the undercurrent of misogynistic language and male-centrism taints Cholodenko’s potentially beautiful story.

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Megan Kearns is a Bitch Flicks Staff Writer. She’s a feminist vegan blogger and freelance writer living in Boston. Megan blogs at The Opinioness of the World, a feminist vegan site she founded in 2010 which focuses on gender equality and living cruelty-free. She writes about gender and media as a Regular Blogger at Fem2pt0, a site uniting social issues with women’s voices. Her work has also appeared at Arts & Opinion, Feministing’s Community Blog, Italianieuropei, Open Letters Monthly, A Safe World for Women and Women and Hollywood. She earned her B.A. in Anthropology and Sociology from UMass Amherst and a Graduate Certificate in Women and Politics and Public Policy from UMass Boston. You can follow all of Megan’s opinionated musings on Twitter at @OpinionessWorld.

LGBTQI Week: Kissing Jessica Stein

Movie poster for Kissing Jessica Stein

This is a review by monthly guest contributor Carrie Nelson.

(Warning: Contains spoilers about Kissing Jessica Stein.)

Ten years ago, I saw Kissing Jessica Stein on a date with my first girlfriend. We liked the movie, but when we walked out of the theater, we laughed and said to each other, “Let’s not end up as dysfunctional as those two!” The irony did not escape us a few months later, when we broke up under eerily similar circumstances as Jessica and Helen, the film’s protagonists. But much like Jessica and Helen, our break-up was the start of our lifelong friendship. I’ve re-watched the film countless times throughout the last decade, and objectively, I don’t think Kissing Jessica Stein is a great movie. It’s filled with too many romantic comedy clichés, and for a film about queer women in a relationship, the film is awfully preoccupied with discussions about men. But in its best moments, it authentically depicts the awkwardness of new relationships, the confusion of unexpected sexual attraction, and the deep friendships that result from failed romances. Kissing Jessica Stein is flawed, but its sincerity and its willingness to address relationships between non-monosexual women keeps me coming back to it, over and over.

Though words like “bisexual” and “queer” are never used, Kissing Jessica Stein is about sexual fluidity. The Rilke quotation mentioned throughout the film makes this theme obvious:

“It is not inertia alone that is responsible for human relationships repeating themselves from case to case, indescribably monotonous and unrenewed: it is shyness before any sort of new, unforeseeable experience with which one does not think oneself able to cope. But only someone who is ready for everything, who excludes nothing, not even the most enigmatical will live the relation to another as something alive.” (Emphasis added)

Much like Alyssa in Chasing Amy, Helen places a personal ad in the Women-Seeking-Women section because she “excludes nothing” sexually. When it occurs to her that, in all her sexually adventurous years, she has yet to sleep with a woman, she decides to give it a try – hence the personal ad. But she’s completely unprepared for Jessica Stein – who Helen later calls a “Jewish Sandra Dee” – to respond. As the film chronicles the rise and fall of Jessica and Helen’s romantic relationship, it tackles some big questions: Can a woman who’s only dated men have a successful sexual relationship with a woman? When, if ever, is secrecy in a relationship acceptable? Can a relationship with high emotional connection and low sexual compatibility survive?

Jessica and Helen in Kissing Jessica Stein

Kissing Jessica Stein provides no easy answers to the questions it asks, which I appreciate. The film understands that sexuality is complicated, and not everyone shares the same capacity for fluidity and sexual experimentation. The film also understands that there is no definitive recipe to a successful relationship, because people are different and have radically different priorities when choosing significant others. Jessica and Helen start out coming from similar places – both of them have identified as straight for all of their lives, and both of them want to question that assumption and explore the possibility of dating another woman. In time, they find that they truly are attracted to each other – more than that, they love each other – but that attraction manifests differently in each of them. While Helen has no insecurities about a sexual relationship with Jessica and longs to have the kind of relationship with Jessica that she’s had with men in the past, Jessica is more interested in her emotional connection with Helen than her sexual one. I don’t think this means that Jessica is straight or that she isn’t genuinely attracted to Helen – we never see her in a relationship with a man, so it’s likely that her sex drive is naturally low. Rather than judging Jessica and Helen for their differences, the film shows both women as they are, and it explores the ways in which their differences both cultivate and destroy their relationship.

The biggest problem that I have with Kissing Jessica Stein is that it simply isn’t as queer as it wants to seem. As Stephen Metcalf wrote in his review at Slate, “It’s a shame that a movie about openness regarding sexual preference recycles so many motifs from the pantheon of great hetero-dating movies.” Though Kissing Jessica Stein addresses interesting questions and themes rarely found in your average romantic comedy, it’s also fairly formulaic. The stakes never feel quite as intense as they should; even when it becomes clear that the relationship is about to come to an end, there’s never any doubt that Jessica and Helen will remain the best of friends. And then there’s the issue of men. Neither Jessica nor Helen identifies as a lesbian, and I like that choice – the film does a great job of dismantling the gay/straight, either/or binary. That said, one would think that women who are attracted to other women might want to spend some time exploring that. There’s nothing wrong with Jessica and Helen discussing which male celebrities fall into the category of “sexy-ugly” (and I completely agree with their conclusion that Harvey Keitel is among them), but I found it hard to believe that they wouldn’t spend more time finding common ground on what they find appealing about women as well. It’s as if too much overt lesbianism would make the film hard for audiences to swallow. Too much of the film makes it feel like it was made for primarily straight viewers, and that feels like a missed opportunity.

Jessica and Helen in Kissing Jessica Stein

When I watch Kissing Jessica Stein now, I’m transported back to a very specific time and place. I remember being sixteen and newly out as bisexual. I remember anxiously anticipating my first kiss from another girl. I remember starting to understand that sexual expression can be flexible and doesn’t have to conform to societal norms. It shouldn’t matter whom we love or what we call ourselves – only that we love at all, and that we express that love in the most honest way we can. Kissing Jessica Stein is not the first film to convey this message, nor does it do it as well as some other films. It’s certainly not as risky as Shortbus, or even Humpday. But it captures a feeling to which many can relate. And even when it fails, it feels far more believable than most comedies of its genre.

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Carrie Nelson is a Bitch Flicks monthly contributor. She was a Staff Writer for Gender Across Borders, an international feminist community and blog that she co-founded in 2009. She works as a grant writer for an LGBT nonprofit, and she is currently pursuing an MA in Media Studies at The New School.

LGBTQI Week: Growing Up Queer: ‘Water Lilies’ (2007) and ‘Tomboy’ (2011)

This is a guest review by Max Thornton.

Céline Sciamma’s films are ever so French. Light on dialogue, they tend to rely on lingering shots of longing glances and exquisite mise-en-scène to reveal character; loosely plotted, they leave the impression less of a story than of a series of vignettes, of tiny moments freighted with great import.

These techniques are uniquely suited to the onscreen portrayal of adolescence. It almost seems churlish to complain that Water Lilies and Tomboy lack full structural coherence, because that’s arguably intentional. Growing up, after all, is not a tightly-plotted three-act hero’s journey with clear turning points, tidy linear progression through the successive stages of personal development, and a satisfying ending. It’s a messy and confusing struggle to find a place in the world, littered with incidents that may or may not ultimately be significant (with no way to tell the difference), and most of the time the morals make no sense.

Sciamma instinctively understands this, and the little stories she tells of growing up queer are given vivid life through her two greatest strengths as a filmmaker: her ability to coax marvelously deep and naturalistic performances out of her young actors, and her eye for a strikingly memorable little scene that perfectly encapsulates a moment of overpowering adolescent emotion – the normally boisterous Anne clutching at a lamppost and weeping in Water Lilies, for example, or Tomboy‘s Laure curling up on the couch, thumb in mouth, suddenly overwhelmed by an earlier humiliation.

Both films are carried on the remarkably expressive faces of their lead actresses. There are no voice-over monologues or expository conversations, but both Water Lilies and Tomboy present the inner life of their protagonists with stunning depth and rawness.

Movie poster for Water Lilies

The protagonist of Water Lilies is Pauline Acquart’s Marie, a quiet fifteen-year-old with a crush on Floriane, star of the local synchronized swimming team. Marie’s best friend Anne, meanwhile, has her eye on Floriane’s boyfriend François. So far, so Gossip Girl, but there is nothing over-dramatic or sensationalistic about the way this love quadrilateral plays out. Although the film’s primary focus is on the blossoming friendship between Marie and Floriane, there is a clear thematic through-line of what it is to grow up female in the patriarchy. Marie, Anne, and Floriane all embody different ways of being young women, and especially young women coming into their sexuality.

Anne, though less conventionally feminine than the other girls, is confidently heterosexual and determined to sleep with the boy she finds attractive. Marie is so eager to spend time with Floriane that she agrees to help her sneak out to meet François, and her yearnings for the lithe bodies slipping through the water are beautifully conveyed through moments such as the shot of Marie shifting, flustered, as Floriane unselfconsciously changes into a swimsuit right in front of her. Floriane herself, despite the reputation she cultivates (perhaps recognizing that denial would be futile – once branded a “slut,” a teenage girl is hopelessly trapped in a no-win morass of contradictory social pressures), eventually confesses to Marie that she has never actually had sex, and in fact is afraid to do so.

“If you don’t want to do it, don’t.”

“I have to.”

“Where did you read that?”

“All over my face, apparently. If he finds out I’m not a real slut, it’s over.”

Floriane recounts several instances of sexual harassment from men; when Marie has no similar stories to share, Floriane tells her, “You’re lucky… very lucky.” And perhaps to some extent she is. Perhaps, as Anne and Marie float fully-clothed in the pool at the end of the movie, while Floriane dances alone for the boys she’s not certain she even wants to be with, they are considering their good fortune: they, at least, are strong enough to defy the patriarchal dictates around female sexual behavior, to name and claim their desires (or lack thereof), to make mistakes and learn from them without being defined by them. Growing up female in this world is hard, but they know they will make it.

Movie poster Tomboy

Tomboy tells a very different story of growing up queer. Zoé Héran turns in a truly remarkable performance as androgynous ten-year-old Laure, who, on moving to a new neighborhood, is asked by the friendly Lisa, “T’es nouveau?” – “Are you new?” – in a way that genders Laure male. In that moment, Laure becomes Mikael, a boy who spends a happy summer among his new friends and his puppy-love girlfriend Lisa. For the duration of the summer, Laure is confined to home and family (well-meaning dad, heavily pregnant mom, hyper-femme little sister Jeanne), and Mikael is the face presented to the world.

Any ten-year-old lives in the present, and Mikael meets each challenge as it arises – sneaking away deep into the woods when the other boys casually take a pee break; snipping a girl’s swimsuit into a boy’s, and constructing a Play-Doh packer to fill it; swearing Jeanne to secrecy when Lisa unwittingly tells her about Mikael – even as it becomes increasingly clear to the viewer that eventually Laure’s parents must find out about Mikael. As loving as they are, they still exert some gender-policing of their oldest child: Mom’s delight at hearing that Laure has made a female friend (“You’re always hanging out with the boys”) might have been tempered if she’d remembered that “copine” can also mean girlfriend!

The relationships between the various children are superbly observed, and constitute reason enough to see Tomboy in themselves. The energetic activities of childish horseplay that give Mikael such joy in himself and in his body – dancing enthusiastically with Lisa, playing soccer shirtless, wrestling in swimsuits on the dock – are balanced by the many lovely domestic scenes demonstrating the closeness of Laure’s relationship with Jeanne. This is honestly one of the most moving and genuine cinematic portrayals of a sibling relationship in years, and after her initial shock Jeanne takes to the idea of Mikael like a duck to water, boasting to another child about her awesome big brother, and telling her parents that her favorite of Laure’s new friends is Mikael.

The parents themselves, unfortunately, are much less accepting of Mikael. The film’s ending is ambiguous, allowing for multiple readings of the exact nature of Laure’s queerness; indeed, the film has been criticized as “an appropriation of trans narratives by a cis filmmaker toward her own purposes”; but to me the ending is terribly unhappy. With deep breaths and with profound conflict on Héran’s preternaturally expressive face, the character is forced to claim “Laure,” the name and gender assigned at birth and not the ones of choice. The cissupremacy has won this round.

Though Tomboy is the better film, the two movies make excellent companion pieces. Between them they depict a range of queerness and explore a variety of strategies for growing up queer (and/or female) in a hostile world. And yet they offer no easy solutions, no cheap moralizing, no promise that it gets better. These films, and the characters they portray, simply are. And, in the end, isn’t that the one universal truth of queer people? There is no ur-narrative of queerness. There is no right or wrong way to be queer. We simply are.

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Max Thornton is a grad student and a stranger in a strange land, who writes words at Gay Christian Geek and has previously contributed a review of No Country For Old Men.

LGBTQI Week: ‘But I’m a Cheerleader’

Movie poster for But I’m a Cheerleader

This is a guest review by Erin Fenner. But I’m a Cheerleader, directed by Jamie Babbit, plays with stereotypes. But not like, “haha let’s use broad generalizations to create characters, but never develop them.” No, this film paints everything pink and blue (pretty much literally) and then asks the audience: Really? Is this what gender and sexuality should look like?It’s even in the title. But I’m a Cheerleader is about a teenage girl, Megan (Natasha Lyonne), who’s naïve about her own sexuality because she fits so comfortably into the norm of femininity. She’s Christian, an “all-American girl” and a cheerleader, so she doesn’t suspect that her attraction to women and sexual disinterest with men is a sign that she’s a lesbian.

It takes an intervention and her parents’ sending her to a “pray away the gay” sort of camp, for Megan to realize she’s gay. Her family sends her to the camp “New Directions” hoping she’ll come back straight, but it only instills in Megan a certainty about her sexuality she hadn’t had before. Not only does she realize that being a lesbian is part of who she is, but through falling in love with another girl at the camp, Megan finds out that she doesn’t want to change it either.

This camp, by the way, looks like it came out of Tim Burton’s nightmares: brightly colored, celebrating conformity and bursting with perkiness.

The director of the camp, Mary Brown (Cathy Moriarty), “cures” homosexuality with a five-step-program. This program mostly involves making the collection of not-so-hetero teenagers act out their gender roles. The different campers are encouraged to find the root cause of their homosexuality – usually being a moment in their childhood where they witnessed adults deviating from gender norms. One’s mom wore pants at her wedding. Another’s mother let him play in pumps. Etcetera.

And so, Mary’s process is to push the adolescents into the cartoon versions of manhood and womanhood. The boys work with Mike (RuPaul) by playing football in solid blue uniforms, fixing a solid blue car and acting out war with solid blue weapons. The girls have their own solid pink version of this: changing baby doll’s diapers, cleaning house and painting nails.

And, through this process we can see how outlandish the performance of gender is. The characters themselves don’t fit neatly into their prescribed roles, and that’s what this film has fun with. We are presented with stereotypes that are swiftly debunked.Megan, for instance, is the exemplary feminine teenager: bouncy blonde hair, bubbly and, yes, she’s a cheerleader. But she also happens to be gay. Dolph (Dante Basco) is a jock who presents himself with military formality and is the first to be booted out of the camp for making out with a fellow male camper. On the other hand, Jan (Katrina Phillips) presents herself in a masculine way. She cries out during a group therapy meeting that, “Everybody thinks I’m this big dyke because I wear baggy pants and play softball and I’m not as pretty as other girls, but that doesn’t make me gay. I mean, I like guys. I can’t help it!”The film picks away at our association with gender and sexuality by presenting us with characters across the gender spectrum – reminding us that sexuality isn’t about whether you paint your nails, but who you are attracted to.

But I’m a Cheerleader does fall into some traps. In portraying characters that are outrageous, there are lots of stereotypically flamboyant gay men. It’s less heinous than most portrayals in the mainstream, and seems to at least be trying to have a purpose. We see Mary’s son, Rock, in short shorts dancing around while ostensibly doing landscape work; living up to the most ridiculous and irritating gay stereotype. But, it’s supposed to be over-the-top to reveal the hypocrisy and absurdity of the camp. Also, while the film does a great job challenging the association of gender and sexuality, and presenting a gender spectrum, it doesn’t explore the spectrum of sexuality so much. Bisexuality is invisible.

But overall, the narrative is one that successfully challenges sexism and heteronormativity. Megan’s journey of falling in love and accepting herself looks normal compared to the antics of those who support the camp. It certainly feels more natural and provides a heart to the film that grounds it.

Megan’s romance with Graham (Clea DuVall) has the perfect combination of silly sweetness and teenage angst. While Graham accepts that she’s gay and is sure it is unchangeable, she is willing to stay in the closet to continue getting support from her family. When Graham and Megan are exposed – Megan leaves the camp, and Graham stays.

Reparative therapy has been the butt of many jokes, but it has existed and been validated by hack psychologists who contort research in an effort to prove that being gay is a mental illness. Robert L. Spitzer who published a study that suggested reparative therapy works, recently made an apology to the gay community because the study has been used to back up harmful methodology. But I’m a Cheerleader tackles an otherwise troubling topic, and makes it funny while still remaining critical.

In the film, while some characters make an effort to be straight, it seems clear that all understand it’s a role they are playing to appease their family. The futile effort could be their chance to remain a member of the community they grew up in. Megan knows that choosing to be open about her sexuality could lead to losing her family, but she chooses pride and oh-so-heroically rescues Graham from the altar of straightness (literally.)

But I’m a Cheerleader isn’t trying to be subtle. The absurdity of gender expectations is put on display with a too-bubbly soundtrack. Because: our society’s gender expectations are insane. And, it’s downright crazy to try to force an identity and sexuality on a person. But, But I’m a Cheerleader gives us a little hope at the end of a wacky lace-trimmed narrative. While the camp wasn’t exposed, while the girls weren’t guaranteed their families, Megan still performed a radical action in embracing both her identity as a lesbian and as a cheerleader. She challenged the expectations of her prescribed role, and still got the girl in the end.

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Erin Fenner is a legislative intern and blogger for Trust Women: advocating for the reproductive rights of women in conservative Midwestern states. She also writes for the Trust Women blog and manages their social media networks. She graduated from the University of Idaho with a B.S. in Journalism.

LGBTQI Week: Cracks

This is a guest review by Emily Campbell.

This is a story about lesbian schoolgirls.

Those of you who have already seen Lost and Delirious, The Moth Diaries, D.E.B.S., Therese and Isabelle, Fucking Åmål, But I’m A Cheerleader, Heavenly Creatures, Bilitis, and every other lesbian schoolgirl film out there, just hear me out and try not to roll your eyes yet.

Cracks, the directorial debut of Jordan Scott (daughter of Ridley Scott), is an independent film based on Sheila Kohler’s novel of the same name. Although it was released in Ireland and the UK in 2009, Cracks didn’t come out the US at all until 2011, showing on only six screens. While it takes several liberties with the book, setting it at an isolated British boarding school in the 30’s rather than a South African boarding school in the 60’s, the story faithfully focuses on a group of girls who make up their school’s diving team, their mysterious mentor, Miss G (Green), and the new student who overturns the status quo just by existing.

This is also, mind you, a lesbian boarding school movie in which neither the character with the crush nor the object of the crush tragically commits suicide. Now, I’m not going to swear to you that this is an entirely death-free film, or even that it’s a particularly easy film to watch. I will, however, swear that the characters are fascinating, the score and cinematography are stunning, and Eva Green’s costumes (thank you, Alison Byrne) will take your breath away.

And, for those of you with more refined interests, there’s a scene where she strips off and urges a group of students to join her for some late-night skinny-dipping. This is actually (a) relevant to the plot and (b) shot so beautifully it doesn’t feel gratuitous, both factors that could easily have proven to be pitfalls for several scenes. The entire movie manages to evoke sensuality without crossing the line into lewdness, no mean feat considering how effortlessly it could have portrayed the girls as archetypal nubile young things seething with sexual frustration. Instead, the emphasis is on the characters’ development, not the audience’s titillation.

“To dive is to fly,” says Miss G to her girls. “Set yourself free of the shackles of conformity. Let nothing hold you back except the air itself. You are between heaven and earth. The rules no longer apply.”

And let’s be real, if Eva Green was your diving instructor, you’d probably cede to her every whim too.

When we first meet Miss G, she happens to be wearing the ensemble pictured above while lounging in a rowboat with Di, one of her students, and discussing a scandalous book she had no qualms about lending her.

Di Radfield (Juno Temple) is the star of the diving team and something of a bigwig on campus, the Regina George in the 1934 edition of Mean Girls.

She’s also head over heels for Miss G.

Based on this knowledge alone (and possibly the same three plotlines that tend to occur in most boarding school movies), I personally would already be gritting my teeth in preparation for ninety minutes all about Di’s introspective self-loathing and her efforts to avoid the censure of her peers, the castigation of her teachers, and the denunciation of her desires. In most cases, I wouldn’t be far off the mark: usually, the character with the same-sex crush encounters some kind of scorn from others simply for daring to find another woman attractive, which then becomes the main source of conflict.

But that isn’t the case at all for the girls of the fictitious St. Mathilda’s. Di, instead, is admired for being daring. Already a natural leader, she has even more prestige by being the favorite and having the ear of the teacher all the girls idolize.

Nor does Di herself have any apparent issue with her feelings. “I’ve had rather a lot of lustful thoughts,” she admits during confession, one of only a handful of scenes to feature a male character. “Do I have to be sorry for all of them?”

Her teammates and sometimes lackeys, a garden of British blossoms with names like Poppy (Imogen Poots), Lily (Ellie Nunn), Laurel (Adele McCann), Rosie (Zoe Carroll), and awkward Fuzzy (short for Persephone, played by Clemmie Dugdale), are all in awe of her. One of the first scenes features Poppy eagerly asking if Di, emerging from the chapel, admitted to reading the book Miss G let her borrow. Di only scoffs that they can’t stay pure forever and she sees nothing wrong with wanting to know about the real world. And of course, she would never do anything that might get Miss G into trouble.

Miss G, who is cultured and serene and has a killer wardrobe, teaches diving (though always fully clothed and from the safety of a dock or rowboat) and apparently at least one additional class that involves textbooks. The only evidence we see of the latter is when she has the girls put their books away and then proceeds to regale them with tales of her adventures in far-off lands—which her students, of course, lap up without question.

Enter new girl Fiamma (María Valverde), the Spanish noble who happens to actually be as well-traveled as Miss G claims to be.

Fiamma, the living embodiment of the outside world, quietly challenges the authority of both Di and Miss G almost immediately. She joins the team and usurps Di as their top diver, exposes Miss G’s fantastical stories as word-for-word recitations of Mary Kingsley, and demands to know why the divers never compete against other schools. She is every bit the catalyst her name implies, causing the students to consider several of the questions we as viewers have been accumulating all along.

Until now, the girls have been accustomed to the remoteness of their lives, with only Miss G’s stories as a window to anything else. The school itself, located on a fictional island off the coast of England, is accessible only by ferry. Letters home are meant to show students’ “fine penmanship and turn of phrase” and are read by their teacher before being approved and sent. The divers share the same dorm and classes, bound into an elite little coterie by their positions on the team, led all the while by a teacher who never dives, never risks or plunges herself, but swears that the most important thing in life is desire and makes them all believe it.

While the rest of the team is amazed by her, Miss G in particular becomes fascinated with Fiamma, both wanting her and wanting to be her. Di, however, resents Fiamma for replacing her as Miss G’s favorite.

We learn, through Miss G’s snooping, that Fiamma was sent away for becoming involved with a boy of a far lower social status than her own. While Fiamma believes she will only be held at the school until the air clears for her back home, its almost ethereal isolation assumes a more menacing role when Miss G calmly reels off the names of other girls who also thought they would only be there for a short time. “Only Di,” she tells Fiamma, “realized this is forever.”

But Fiamma’s only response is, “It is not forever. They will leave you.”

Gradually it comes to light that, although Miss G constantly tells outrageous anecdotes about her life, she herself is actually a product of the same school. When asked by a ferryman, she coolly admits she does not care for open water. The one time she leaves school grounds, we see her mumbling to herself and visibly steeling up to stroll through the tiny town on the mainland in order to buy treats for Fiamma. As the girls’ coach, she easily plays the sultry storyteller who captivates them all, but once out of her element she literally isn’t able to walk the walk.

Her obsession with Fiamma manifests in progressively disturbing ways, from showering her with affection to stealing her belongings to a truly disturbing scene where she forces Fiamma to dive whilst on the verge of an asthma attack. While the other girls adore Miss G unquestioningly, Fiamma fails time and time again to be ensnared by her spell. And when Miss G learns that she can never regain control or save face while Fiamma is around, her resolution isn’t pretty.

This is a story about three passionate women that just so happens to take place in a boarding school: Miss G, who struggles to uphold the persona she’s created for herself within the institution she can’t leave; Fiamma, everything Miss G could never be; and Di, enthralled by her hero’s tales of far-off places but so reluctant to accept a person actually from one of them.

Cracks is guilty of falling into the characterization trope of the sophisticated mentor who isn’t at all what she seems, as well as the more troubling trope of the predatory deviant who clearly isn’t right in the head. As Miss G’s obsession with Fiamma escalates, so does her exposure as a pathological liar who glamorizes herself for the teams’ affections. The film also borrows liberally from the old boarding school standby of catty girls turning on each other at every opportunity (interestingly, several actors were boarding school students themselves when the movie was filmed) and their motivations blow hot and cold too quickly to seem logical at times—one minute they’re turning on Fiamma at Di’s behest, and the next they’re striking a truce and planning to have a midnight feast.

While the novel Cracks was titled after a slang term for a crush, throughout the movie we see actual cracks as they appear in Miss G, in the sway she holds over her girls, and in the complacence of the girls themselves when their world and their idol are shaken apart. The story ends with all three of the main characters taking leave of the school in different ways, a conclusion just open-ended enough to leave you wondering if the reality created for these girls actually is forever, or if independence is still possible in spite of it all.

Further reading: The New York Times review

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Emily Campbell is an M. Ed. candidate who has taught English on three continents and still secretly wants to be an Animorph when she grows up.