Better Queer representation

[liv]

Having talked about films which didn't give me the representation I was hoping for, I wanted to contrast with a couple that I saw in better circumstances. Luckily, monanotlisa happened to review the exact two examples I wanted to talk about: Better than chocolate and Call me by your name

Not surprisingly, Better than chocolate was another favourite of the intellectual lesbian community I hovered at the edges of at Oxford. It portrays, well, politically engaged intellectual lesbians, mostly. I don't remember all that much about it; there's a central f/f romance with a bit of an ensemble cast. There's a side-plot about a trans woman who finally finds acceptance as a woman when a radical, man-hating lesbian returns her affections. Which I found somewhat icky even in the 90s, especially as the character, Judy, is played by a cis man. Not that representation of trans women in films has moved on a whole lot in the past 20 years.

And I agree with Mona's comment that Like a lot of queer romantic “comedy”, though, BTC features a considerable amount of homophobia, transphobia, and violence. A lot of the humour is around Maggie and Kim trying to avoid Maggie's mother finding out that they're a couple, and Frances misgendering Judy. And ok, it all works out happily with Maggie's mother accepting her and Frances accepting Judy. But still, the plot hinges on the fact that acceptance is not a given, it's a special happy ending beyond just the protagonist getting together with the love interest.

Another film I liked round about this time was What's cooking, which is a bit like a minor and less relentlessly heterosexual version of Love Actually. It's about a number of different couples celebrating Thanksgiving, and the tensions of returning to your parents' home for the festival. And it has a lot of feel-good stuff about how different immigrant cultures integrate into the melting pot of a romanticized version of pre-9/11 America. The parents of the lesbian viewpoint character are Jewish and the moment of acceptance of their daughter's relationship involves them referencing LGB culture back in the old country. It's only a tiny little vignette really, but I really loved the portrayal of modern lesbians realizing that their straight, immigrant-background parents aren't quite as sheltered as they'd assumed. It's quite rare to see a Jewish character who's not exoticized, nor just a completely generic character who only 'happens to be' Jewish, but part of a Jewish family and culture, let alone one who is also not straight.

Which brings me to the second, contemporary film Call me by your name. I watched it on a date with jack. The context of this one is that I was excited about Disobedience (which isn't released in this country for some months so I have only read about it, not seen it). Disobedience is based on the first novel of Naomi Alderman, who is awesome (she's also the main writer of the Zombies, Run! game, btw). This novel is set in the North London mainstream Orthodox community, and is dedicated to six people four of whom I know personally and can easily recognize among the novel's characters. So it's very very much about people like me, some of whom explicitly identify as bi and/or poly. And a bunch of people on Tumblr were really annoyed about Disobedience being touted as the first ever Queer Jewish film. Of course it's not that, not by a long chalk, but basically all the examples in the Tumblr thread were Israeli films, which I'm sure are very good but they're not available on any of the streaming services we subscribe to, and Trembling before G-d which is... basically a documentary about being gay and Orthodox in the 1990s, so not exactly a date night movie. So I suggested Call me by your name.

And it turned out to be very much worthwhile. It's kind of like a gay Manon des sources: it's about a teenager who comes of age in a gorgeously shot, idyllic southern European landscape, and falls in love and experiences a sexual awakening. Only the teenager and his lover are both Jewish men. sovay says The next person who tells me that Call Me by Your Name (2017) wasn't groundbreaking had better have a list of big, sweeping, non-Holocaust, non-Orthodox, non-tragic queer Jewish romances to back it up. It is, indeed, groundbreaking. Not because it's radically new but precisely because it is so very normal, with characters who just never ever get to be normal. I really wish films like that had been around when I was the age of the characters, I really wish CMBYN wasn't the only example of what it is even now in 2018.

Both the lovers, European Elio and American Oliver are seen in onscreen romantic and sexual relationships with women as well as each other, so I think the most useful classification for them is bi, though it's a bit ambiguous how they would self-identify if you asked them. The film strikes exactly the right balance of acknowledging that homophobia (and anti-semitism likewise) exists, without being about people being tragically persecuted. It's not a comedy, it's all about unbearably deep feelings, but the tragedy is about a young man getting his heart broken because teenage summer romances don't last, not about the world being cruel to him because of his identity. The other thing that's wonderful about CMBYN is Elio's parents. They are not merely not homophobic, they are actively supportive of their son's sexual explorations, arranging for the two lovers to have alone time, and comforting Elio when his beloved returns to America. I was quite weepy over the portrayal of such a positive parent-child relationship.

Some people are bothered by the age gap relationship. Oliver is a few years older than Elio, at an age where a few years really makes a difference. I often find that kind of romance squicky, but I felt that CMBYN made it pretty clear that this was a consensual relationship, with no significant power imbalance between the characters. I probably wouldn't think twice about a romantic film where a 17yo girl falls in love with a man in his early 20s.

I'm a bit annoyed about the choices around depicting sex, though. I think the film is probably constrained by restrictions on showing erect penises on screen, and it's awkward to show explicit m/m sex without showing erections. But there's a stark contrast between the sex scene between Elio and his girlfriend which shows coitus right on screen, and the central sex scene between Elio and Oliver which is almost literally faded to black: the camera pans to a nearby tree and shows the branches gently waving in the wind for about 3 minutes. It really undermines the whole way the rest of the film is set up to show a m/m relationship as fully equal and valid. (Better than chocolate doesn't show sex on screen either, just a clichéd rocking vehicle. But it doesn't show any het relationships either, and honestly I don't think it deserved its R rating.)

I definitely liked the Jewish themes too. The honest discussions about how open you can be, the navigating Jewishness as one aspect of identity, the scene with the chanukah candles being lit in a sprawling upper-middle class European home. I remembered the 'Jews of discretion' line differently from Mona; I thought Elio quoted his mother, not his father, as saying that. But either way, the characterization is nuanced, and I like Mona's thoughts about the contrast between European and American attitudes. Another aspect I liked was the casual code-switching; Elio's family switch between Italian, French and English, with subtitles when needed. I learn that the author of the book that inspired the film, André Aciman, is an Egyptian Sephardi exile. I am somehow heartened to know that there's an #OwnVoices element in the history of the film.

Comments

[adrian_turtle]

Seeing them side by side on a plane made me think of the airline showing them, even though I know that's not a Thing anymore. So my first reaction was, "Where on earth were you GOING?"