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but there's a "festival effect" let's call it, whereby I think the opinions of people are steered by their "privilege" of being the first to see something. Because of PORTRAIT's performance, Neon limited the screenings of the latter, creating even more of an aura around a relatively unremarkable film. strongly" we're talking about a highly self-selected sample of people versus the broader public, naturally the result is going to be a strong response.Īlso note that NEON picked up both of these films. PORTRAIT OF A LADY ON FIRE did $10m ($3.75m domestic/US) and AMMONITE did $1.38m ($161k domestic). Why do audiences respond so strongly to such aesthetics?Īs a critic who happens to be a POC and first generation immigrant, I think the question here is a bit self-selecting. I think a lot of people have the bizarre experience of loving history and thinking about history, and then going to history class and not understanding why the material in front of them is so boring and alienating, but, luckily, new kinds of histories are being taught and disseminated, and this dovetails a lot with larger questions of community identity especially for queer people (and queer women in particular): am I just a product of some contemporary social movement, or do I also "belong" to a longer tradition? Who would I have been and what life would I have lived if I were born a few hundred years ago? Questions that might be simpler and much more studied for people not living lives that have been marginalized from the record. My guess for the period dramas is that it has a lot to do with new trends in critical queer histories: the new favourite past time of lots of queer women, which is in part caused by the double (or triple/quadruple) absenting of both women and queer love from dominant modes of history in the 20th c (so-called political history). Well, the next question would be: why do audiences respond so strongly to such aesthetics? This answers well why there seems to be a collapsing of expression into a set of recognizable tropes but the original question is still open: why these tropes, and not others? So, what are your thoughts? Why do these movies look and sound so similar? Do you agree or am I completely wrong? The only things I could come up with was how the colorful palette of M/M films might be derived from the flamboyance associated with homosexual men, but that seems contradicted by multiple of my own examples that, while certainly featuring stark colors, are nowhere near ”flamboyant.” As for the F/F films, maybe it has to do with the fact that many famous women of the 18th and 19th century were lesbians? This seems a bit farfetched to me. I’m really interested in diving into what it is in our artistic groupmind that is spawning this trend.
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There is a chillyness to the proceedings, with these very melancholic string or piano based scores to underscore the mood.Įxamples: Carol (2015), The Handmaiden (2016), The Favourite (2018), Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019), Ammonite (2020), The World to come (2020) I have intentionally disincluded movies dealing with the AIDS epidemic because obviously those will be set in the late 1900s.Īs for movies with lesbian romances, we opften find these muted period dramas that are borderline black and white in their palettes, with fall or winter settings that are almost always cloudy, stormy, rainy or snowy. God’s Own Country (2017) was the only well-known example I could think of that contradicted this trend.Įxamples: Weekend (2011), Stranger by the Lake (2013), Boys (2014), Moonlight (2016), Handsome Devil (2016), Call Me By Your Name (2017), Beach Rats (2017), Love, Simon (2018), Your Name Engraved Herein (2020), Summer of ’85 (2021) Musically, the score tends to stray towards the electric/synthlike. Even on the occasions where the setting is modern (as in, like, today), the visuals often borrow heavily from the 80s/90s aesthetic, sometimes so much so that you wonder if the filmmakers wanted to set their movie in that time, but maybe the story required cellphones or something. Gay movies featuring male on male romance is very often set in the late 20th century summers, doused in bright lights and colors/and or neon. It just struck me how so many of the films made in the last five to ten years about lesbian and gay romances often fall into these very clear, respective categories in regards to aesthetics.