The softening of queer cinema

In this piece, film critic M K Raghavendra examines a handful of international films that chart the trajectory of portrayals of queer relationships towards diminishing complexity.

Queer cinema has transformed in the past decade or two — especially with ‘political correctness’ in the representation of LGBTQ+ communities in gender issues. These communities have been treated alongside the disadvantaged as determined by race and class, but one cannot be sure that this has helped since the recognition of ‘disadvantage’ tends to direct portrayals in a certain direction, away from complexity. As an instance, homosexual love, by all liberal logic, should be equal to love among heterosexuals and, since social conflicts are allowed to inform portrayals of heterosexual relationships, would it not be a good thing for them to be admitted into homosexuality as well? But, by and large, it seems that discrimination from outside is the primary issue
that the portrayals deal with. In this piece I examine a handful of international films that chart the trajectory of portrayals of queer relationships towards diminishing complexity.     

Since interpersonal relationships are ambiguous in real life, many gestures were later interpreted as homosexual when that became an issue needing addressing. The earliest is likely The Dickson Experimental Sound Film from 1895. This short film features two men dancing together, and while it was not labelled as a homosexual act at the time, some film critics noted its subversion of conventional male behaviour. Similarly Marlene Dietrich in Sternberg’s Morocco (1930) kisses a woman, which may be taken to be lesbianism. The Best Man (1964) — where a character (played by Cliff Robertson) is accused of being homosexual — was the first American film to use the word “homosexual”. 

Among the earliest (and greatest) filmmakers to be openly gay and also deal with gay relationships was R W Fassbinder in the Germany of the 1970s. Consider only his Fox and His Friends (1975). In this film a working-class homosexual (played by Fassbinder) wins 5,00,000 marks in a lottery and gets into a relationship with an upper-class man he meets in a public toilet. The latter and his associates ruthlessly exploit Fox and leave him penniless. Fox (who takes pride in his larger penis) imagines he is in their class because of the lottery but is too naïve to understand that it cannot elevate him socially. Fassbinder uses male nudity extensively but it is usually to show the group dressing according to class — Fox in a leather jacket and his friends in dapper suits and ties. In a memorable scene, a cocky Fox is reclining on his lover’s bed while his two upper-class ‘friends’ quietly discuss his odour — that of a public urinal.

Fassbinder was brutally explicit in his portrayals but there were gentler films in the1970s like John Schlesinger’s Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971) in which a bisexual artist bed-hops between two characters played by Glenda Jackson and Peter Finch. It does not treat homosexuality as an ‘issue’ and neither does La Cage aux Folles (1978), the hit French comedy about a gay couple who run a nightclub featuring drag entertainment. Their lives are thrown into crisis when their straight son marries a girl from a conservative family. 

It is difficult to say when homosexuality became treated an issue of victimisation but the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s may have played a part. In Philadelphia (1993), a young lawyer (Tom Hanks) infected with AIDS keeps his homosexuality hidden from his employers. When he is suddenly dismissed, he hires a homophobic lawyer (Denzel Washington) for a wrongful dismissal suit and there is a parallel drawn between sexual and racial discrimination. A truly great film is Pedro Almodovar’s All About My Mother (1999) which has a transvestite character with AIDS siring a child but infecting and killing the mother.

The theme of the victimisation of gay people abated in the last decade or two because of the wider acceptance of queerness but films like The Imitation Game (2014) still accommodate it out of necessity for being true to fact. The best films draw from literary sources — works by authors who identify as gay. One could cite James Ivory’s Maurice (1987) based on E M Forster’s novel and Todd Haynes’s Carol (2015) here. Among the greatest of gay writers was Jean Genet (1910-1986) and Todd Haynes’s debut film Poison (1991), a triptych of stories inspired by Genet’s novels. But Haynes’s Carol is a better film based on a novel by Patricia Highsmith, who was openly lesbian. Her noir novel The Talented Mr Ripley (1955) features a very ambiguous male-male relationship. Haynes’s Carol is about a wealthy woman trying to escape from a failed marriage into a relationship with a shop girl. It is set in 1952 and is based on a partly autobiographical novel. Cate Blanchett plays Carol and the film is about sexuality overcoming the barriers of class. Standing out is the scene where the shop girl, after their break-up, intrudes upon an upper-class party where the older woman catches her eye awkwardly.      

But LGBTQ+ relationships are treated very carefully in cinema today even if the stale theme of victimisation has left it. Heterosexual relationships have been treated brutally but cinema portrays gay relationships softly as in Call Me By Your Name (2017) or Moonlight (2016) — as if recollecting past prejudices. But is Fassbinder’s kind of boldness possible in any cinema today since the tendency is to sentimentalise victimhood?  ‘Sensitivity’ to social or sexual issues does not mean to tread so carefully but that factor is overlooked.     

(The author is a well-known film critic)