Teenage Love Affair
President Pence) to the gay community. Were TIME’s question to be launched further south of the US – in Honduras or Gautemala in Central America or Jamaica, or Trinidad and in Guyana it would be downright idiotic. The better question would be whether those who need “Love, Simon” (both those who would see it for support, and those who would see it to glean a different perspective) would actually see it.
“Love, Simon” usually for better, but occasionally for worst, is indebted to the conventions it’s borne out of. It’s clear to see where director Greg Berlanti and writers Isaac Aptaker and Elizabeth Berger leaned into traditional aspects of youngadult romances to make their point. And so, the film’s big climax depends on a declaration of romance in front of the school that’s completely ridiculous but clearly aspirational in the way it is written. The film delays and delays (and delays) any real confrontation of sex and sexuality but with a clear focus, so that when the first on-screen moment of homosexual embrace comes, it’s set to resounding applause of hundreds in the film. It’s a deft touch, fanciful and utopian but understandable. It’s this utopian sheen that perhaps dulls things the film could make sharper. It’s great for presenting a racially diverse world, less so on presenting body diversity – a common issue in Hollywood’s views of utopias. The film’s approach to gayness in that way, then, is more diffident than aggressive but even that makes sense.
One of the eight persons in the theatre was one of my former high-school students who I had taught four years. “What did you think of it,” I asked her when it ended. “I almost cried at some parts,” she gushed. And I chuckled inwardly even if I was less laudatory. It emphasised the aspirational quality of the film. “Love, Simon” perhaps does not present some accurate or even realistic portrayal of gay life, but like any young adult teen endeavour it flirts with reality while presenting something a few miles removed from real life. Something grander, something more symmetrical, more aspirational and freer. It puts you in a strange situation when you try to marry its aspirational qualities lifted from films which are historically heterosexual with issues which are not. Berlanti’s argument that a gay romance is just like a straight romance is perhaps facile. Like trying to mix capitalism and feminism. The two ideologies seem incongruous. The original novel understood that, with its prickly title setting up the binary opposites the film only flirts with. The film offers something softer and I realise, though, it is fine for what it is. I just wonder if those in Guyana – the teens and the adults – who need to take solace in why its version of utopia is so important will bother to go out and see it.
“Love, Simon” is currently playing at Caribbean Cinemas and Princess Movie Theatres Guyana