Great Queer & LGBTQ-Themed Films

A painful, melancholic, heartfelt, healing, and hilarious dramedy about love, illness, death, grief, and kinship in a heterosexist society. This beautiful film interrogates what it means to be a family.

Animist with classicist tendencies.

Recommended reviews/analysis:

• https://www.cinemaescapist.com/2019/02/dear-ex-movie-review/
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-aidYtWrVDs

A subtle, beautiful, and poetic slow-burn which covers similar narrative and thematic ground as His (2020) in its depiction of small-town queerness and its exploration of what constitutes a family - but which also explores alternative kinship ties in more depth; and which resonates with So Long, See You Tomorrow (2021)'s observation of the sacrifices involved in self-exile as a mode of escape. But this quiet drama has a more brutal representation of homophobia and its consequences, a bleaker tone, and a more artistically-distinctive execution.

Classicist and animist.

Recommended reviews/analysis:

• https://blwatcher.com/bl-movies/a-distant-place-movie-review/
• https://loudandclearreviews.com/a-distant-place-bfi-flare-review-film/
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FE-2d3vo5I4 + https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XxDpb5248Dk

This stunningly polished and stylish revenge thriller (and occasional dark comedy) retells (from the perspective of the two queer women leading this show) the story of how they overturned and escaped from heteropatriarchal and colonial masculinity and sexual abuse by subverting their compromised social positions in 1930s colonized Korea & Japan. There is controversy over the sexual politics of the erotic lesbian sex scenes as grounded in [hetero] male fantasy + gaze, and those scenes weren't enjoyable for me, a Known Gay (though there were moments that my gayze was drawn to Count Fujiwara, pls don't at me); however, I believe the film critically questions [attentive] viewers about the always-already compromised context of the lesbian sex scenes by drawing attention to the characters' deliberate performance/appropriation of these tropes (in a way that is similar to how drag artists perform gender via queerly excessive mimicry of viewers' expectations about how gender works).

Animist and classicist.

Recommended reviews/analysis:

• https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-handmaiden-2016a
• https://www.anothergaze.com/review-the-handmaiden/
• https://digital.lib.washington.edu/researchworks/items/7faeadd6-1598-40a6-b486-f5eec3ad6ba7
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XF0K1-0tpew

Formally quite beautiful, and simultaneously subtle and melodramatic in a gay way. Here, things happen, and then we build ourselves a narrative afterwards from the scattered pieces which remain. Just like life.

I love the slow, spaced-out pacing of the scenes: each image has room to breathe, and as the viewer I am given the opportunity to soak myself in the time of life which—as the film reminds us at the very beginning—is incredibly finite.

As the film's plot progresses, rather well-trodden (and depressing) BL and societal-homophobia tragedy tropes take focus in a way that isn't particularly novel; but as this happens, the images become even more beautiful— and even more haunting.

In the self-awareness of the way it plays with showing the work of filmmaking in various scenes throughout the film, this film feels a bit like if someone who loves Tsai Ming-liang films and Funeral Parade of Roses (1969) decided to make their own film.

The overwhelming feeling I come away with is this excerpt from Chambers-Letson & Nyong'o & Pellegrini's foreward to Muñoz's "Cruising Utopia": "there is a degree to which we are always standing before queer loss. This is the nature of queer grief. It is informed by life lived after the historical accumulation of queer deaths: a collection of losses that have taught us to know (because our survival depends upon this knowledge) that we are also standing before losses that have yet to come. Queer grief is characterized by the simultaneity of grieving those we have loved and lost, alongside mourning for a queerness and the forms of queer life that we have not yet known and are still yet to lose."

Classicist with formalist tendencies.