The best WLW movie I saw at Outfest was Saint Frances, by a mile. Written by Kelly O’Sullivan, Saint Frances follows Bridget (also played by Sullivan), a directionless thirty-something who picks up a job nannying for a wealthy lesbian couple. We follow Bridget through the trials and tribulations of her own dating life, an abortion, and her relationship to love and intimacy as stacked against the couple she’s nannying for. What I loved most about this movie — besides the wit and the charm of its lead youngin’, Frances (Ramona Edith Williams) — was how it positioned queerness. Saint Frances normalizes its queerness, positioning it in the foreground of the film without tokenizing it. That doesn’t mean it’s an uncomplicated subject, and for me, that’s the sweet spot of queer representation: Normalized and realistic, but not erased.

I’m a sucker for a lesbian sob story — Carol is my absolute shit — but I think I’ve reached a boiling point in hearing about the depraved ways we used to (and still do) punish women for being queer, and it’s actually affected my psyche.

And that, to me, highlights an important distinction about arguments being made for a new kind of queer narrative, one that moves past coming out stories. At first, such arguments insinuated, to me, the idea that queerness isn’t important enough to be talked about, or that downplaying queerness in queer narratives means we don’t want to talk about the hard realities of being a queer woman today. But if queerness becomes so normalized in a story that it’s depicted as ubiquitous or ever-present, like in Saint Frances, that’s a win for representation in my eyes.

Another movie that I (sort of) enjoyed was The Ground Beneath My Feet, a German psycho-thriller about a businesswoman, Lola (Valerie Pachner), her affair with her boss Elise (Mavie Hörbiger), and Lola’s psychotic break amidst dealing with her older sister’s schizophrenia. In this movie, like in Saint Frances, queerness wasn’t the main narrative — rather, it was merely present, a backdrop to tell another narrative. Lola’s story wasn’t that she was queer; it was that she was falling behind in a cutthroat professional world, a world where queerness is visible, normal, not the main issue. We don’t need to discuss that she’s queer, but we’re also not minimizing that either woman is queer, and how that fits into their lives as businesswomen (like when a prospective male client inappropriately hits on Lola in front of Elise).

Riot Girls Cranked Up Films

Many films at Outfest this year fit that bill, like Jules of Light and Dark, an arthouse drama about a bisexual female college couple; Riot Girls, a young adult-schewing sci-fi thriller which features two queer female teenagers; and BIT, a queer girl vampire comedy-horror film. This year, I was less interested in movies like Vita & Virginia, which tells the real-life tale of a secret fling between Virginia Woolf and Baroness Vita Sackville-West, because, despite queerness being centered, I’m just exhausted by narratives about secret lesbian love affairs.

This may not be a very fair assessment, and it’s certainly not unbiased, but the truth is: I still have a well of trauma after spending a decade repressing my own queerness. After watching movies and TV shows like Disobedience, The Favourite, Gentleman Jack and Vita & Virginia, all within the last year or so, I’m not exactly mitigating my internal narrative that being a queer woman is scandalous or abnormal. I’m a sucker for a lesbian sob story — Carol is my absolute shit — but I think I’ve reached a boiling point in hearing about the depraved ways we used to (and still do) punish women for being queer, and it’s actually affected my psyche. I am deeply privileged to be in a place where I can be out and queer, and movies about society’s wicked homophobic past are important narratives, to be sure. But there’s a difference between a dramatic retelling and glamorizing secrecy and affairs. After a while, it feels personally damaging.

For the record, I still love movies about coming out and internalized homophobia and other adjacent queer struggles; these are narratives that are still necessary and relevant today, and any insinuation otherwise is naïve. But attending Outfest this year made me realize that it’s also important for us to look at the current landscape in queer female cinema, admire how far we’ve come, note how far we haven’t, and continue to move forward, rather than rehashing dated narratives.

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