The Best And Worst Moments Of Queer Cinema In 2015

2015 has been a curious year for LGBTIQ representation on screen: the baton was well and truly passed from the cinema to the television, where — thanks to the broadening opportunities presented by the small screen — queer stories, many told by openly gay storytellers, flourished.

In this past year alone, Jill Soloway won acclaim and even an Emmy for Transparent; Andrew Haigh brought to an end his heartwarming and heartbreaking Looking (a movie wrap-up is on its way in 2016); and Queen Latifah made Bessie, her long-gestating biopic of pioneering blues singer Bessie Smith. With the help of Pariah (2012) director Dee Rees, and series like Orange in the New Black, Empire, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, Sense8, Difficult People, and Wet Hot American Summer, TV this year was more entertaining and inclusive than ever before.

Of course, this transition from cinema to television as the driving force of LGBTIQ stories has been happening for many years now. But while queer stories on the big screen have more or less found themselves relegated to classic prestige fare and niche arthouse titles, that doesn’t mean they are obsolete.

The best queer films are increasingly those that offer what television producers cannot: something truly cinematic, that demands an audience engage with and soak up every frame, sitting enraptured for two hours rather than blindly gorging on episode after episode before letting a conveyor belt decide what’s next.

Here’s what the year in queer cinema will be remembered for.

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New Frontiers: Trans Issues, Bisexuality, And Foreign Films

Not just one of the best queer films of 2015, but one of the best films period, Sean Baker’s Tangerine was a fiery shot of in-your-face energy. It’s like a Michael Bay movie took a six-pack of Red Bulls and replaced all of its guns with weaves and donuts.

A new alternative Christmas classic, Baker shot his super low-budget comedic thriller on an iPhone, casting two transgender women, who had limited acting experience, in the lead roles. Bold, fresh, exciting, and deeply original, Tangerine is truly on the cutting edge of cinema and was recently rewarded with a bunch of prestigious Independent Spirit Award nominations, alongside the likes of Cate Blanchett, Idris Elba and Charlie Kaufman.

It’s certainly a stronger film than Tom Hooper’s The Danish Girl, about the world’s first man to go under gender reassignment surgery. That film is more memorable for its costumes than its look inside the mind of a transgender woman of the 1920s.

Yet again, this year proved that there’s a healthier home for LGBTIQ stories outside of the West’s English language-oriented industry. Brazilian filmmaker Karim Aïnouz’s Futuro Beach was one I was particularly affected by; its tale of border-hopping homosexual ennui struck particularly close to home.

Robin Campillo’s Eastern Boys was another strong film, this one about an older Frenchman who gets taken in by a gang of Ukrainian hustlers, but who grows a fondness for the gay boy that initially lures him to the trouble. In light of the Ukrainian struggles of the last few years, as well as the ever-prevalent immigration debate, Eastern Boys remains potent and culturally relevant.

It was refreshing to see bisexuality play a significant role in several films this year. Thanks to Desiree Akhavan’s Appropriate Behaviour, Tony Ayres’ Cut Snake, and the Netflix’s documentary about comedian Tig Notaro, Tig, the ‘B’ in LGBTIQ became a topic that would no longer remain invisible. Hopefully there are more like it in the future.

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Blurred Lines And Boundaries

Sometimes the best queer films are those that have a more complicated relationship with the category.

A movie like Olivier Assayas’ Clouds of Sils Maria, for instance, is a stunning look at two women whose relationship never becomes sexual, but is characterised by a simmering eroticism that eventually becomes one of its strongest assets. In it, French superstar Juliette Binoche plays an ageing actress who ventures to the mountains with her personal assistant, played by Kristen Stewart (Stewart won the French version of an Oscar for her revelatory performance). It’s one of the year’s most confident pictures, casting a spell that lingers long after the mysterious final scenes.

While hardly one of the year’s best, Andy and Lana Wachowski’s Jupiter Ascending is nevertheless a fascinating beast. It is easy to read queer themes into the text of this big-budget sci-fi pulp disaster. But much like its equally queer-tinted predecessor Cloud Atlas (2012), they should have spent more time on a coherent story and less on the gobbledigook CGI, wacky costumes and transforming makeup (Channing Tatum plays a space-wolf with the pointy ears and hover-skates to prove it). Sadly, the most overtly queer thing about the film is Eddie Redmayne’s extraordinarily fey space drag queen villain.

Speaking of Tatum, what of Magic Mike XXL? Its inclusive party atmosphere was surely aimed at gay men as much as it was at women; watching the likes of Matt Bomer and Joe Manganiello without their clothes on certainly helps.

And lastly, there was the delightfully weird Greek/Irish/British/French/Dutch/American (phew) co-production The Lobster from renowned director Yorgos Lanthimos, which had a distinctly interesting take on sex and sexuality (albeit far too brief).

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Longtime Companions

One of the most popular films of the early era of gay cinema was Norman René’s Longtime Companion (1991), which was the first film about AIDS to be released theatrically into mainstream theatres. Its themes continue to resonate with gay audiences, so it’s little surprise that some of the best queer films of the year follow its lead, showing the complicated ups and downs of long-term relationships.

The finest example was Neil Armfield’s excellent Holding the Man. Adapted from Timothy Conigrave’s iconic novel of the same name, the long-in-development film starring Ryan Corr and Craig Stott proved to be worth the wait. A gloriously composed and emotional drama, it tracks the love between two private school boys through the new wave of the ‘70s, the gay revolution of the early ‘80s, and the AIDS crisis of the late ‘80s and ‘90s that eventually took their lives too young. The film was a hit, and proved there are still audiences for these wonderful and heartfelt gay stories.

Just as compassionate was Grandma, which has played local festivals since its premiere at Sundance, and will appear on DVD in the new year. The titular grandma is Lily Tomlin in her first lead film role since Big Business (1988); she is superb as a woman who is still reeling from the death of her life partner, and whose subsequent relationships with her family (Julia Garner as a granddaughter in need of cash for an abortion, and Marcia Gay Harden as her toughened-up daughter) and lovers (Judy Greer, finally in a role that’s more than just “mom”) become strained as a result.

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Are You Gay Enough? The Controversies Of 2015

One of the biggest controversies of the year revolved around Stonewall from director Roland Emmerich, best known for wham-bam action flicks like Independence Day (1996) and Godzilla (1998). The film, a dramatisation of the moment that sparked the gay revolution, was accused of whitewashing, and erasing the contributions of trans men and women as well as drag queens. The film flopped so badly in America that no release is planned for Australia.

More recently, the screenwriter of civil rights drama Freeheld has quietly thrown shade at the studio and the director of the Julianne Moore/Ellen Page film, accusing it of being ‘degayed’ against his wishes. Meanwhile Ron Nyswaner, who was Oscar-nominated for Philadelphia (1993), claims “producers became fearful” and urges us not to forget that “we’re the descendants of outlaws and rebels.” He has a point. While I thought the performances by Moore, Page, and especially Michael Shannon were strong, the film itself — inspired by a true story (and subject of an Oscar-winning documentary of the same name) — felt overly conservative and too much like a TV movies from 1998; as Nyswaner put it, “God forbid someone might think we were making a movie about a couple of dykes. Out of fear, they were normalised.” Nyswaner later issued an apology.

Critics also scoffed at About Ray for the way it turned the story of a transitioning trans boy (played by Elle Fanning) into the story of his unsure mother. The movie was taken off of the release schedule following its festival premiere, and was labelled “lightweight”, “a bland soapy routine”, and “middlebrow”.

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The Best is Yet to Come

Some of the best and most high profile queer titles of 2015 unfortunately haven’t made their way onto Australian screens yet. Todd Haynes’ Carol, out mid-January, is definitely one of the best of the year: it’s a film of such decadent romance and sumptuous design that it’d take a pretty cold-hearted person to not fall under its spell.

 

Adapted from Patricia Highsmith’s novel The Price of Salt, Carol stars Cate Blanchett as a repressed housewife and Rooney Mara as a sad-sack sales assistant; set in 1950s New York, they find each other when they most need it. Unlike most prestige awards season fodder, Carol has little interest in the men (although Kyle Chandler and Jake Lacy imbue the roles with humanity and dignity), and instead offers some of the most strikingly deft observations about queer love and friendship that cinema audiences are likely to have seen.

Also worth keeping an eye on are a trio of films that hit the Cannes, Venice and Toronto film festivals with guns blazing. Venezuelan filmmaker Lorenzo Vigas won the major prize at the Venice Film Festival for From Afar, which, like Eastern Boys, follows a crime-infused inter-generational affair. At Cannes, Turkish actress-cum-director Deniz Gamze Ergüven surprised with the award-winning Mustang, a tale of female coming of age. Lastly, the Canadian creator behind the cute and funny Pop-Up Porno made his feature debut on Closet Monster, which took the Best Canadian Feature Award at Toronto.

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Glenn Dunks is a freelance writer and film critic from Melbourne. He tweets from @glenndunks