Teens praying the gay away
It’s sex education with a sinister difference as Kick-Ass star Chloë Grace Moretz is sent to a ‘gay conversion’ camp in a smart, funny and unsettling teen drama
The Miseducation Of Cameron Post C ert: 15 1hr 31mins
Last year, one of the most talked-about films of the summer was the gorgeouslooking art-house hit Call Me By Your Name, directed by Luca Guadagnino. Northern Italy looked fabulous, Armie Hammer brought men’s shorts back into fashion and the closing music – Sufjan Stevens’s haunting Visions Of Gideon – sent entire audiences out into the street dabbing gently at their eyes. Against all the odds – or certainly against mainstream Hollywood thinking – a film about a teenage boy’s first gay relationship made quite an impact.
Which probably goes some way to explaining both the fuss and the marketing push behind The Miseducation Of Cameron Post. A top prize-winner at the independently spirited Sundance Film Festival and directed by a woman, Desiree Akhavan, it also chronicles a first gayteenager rite of passage but from a much darker angle.
Because when 17-year-old Cameron Post (Kick-Ass star Chloë Grace Moretz) is found having sex in the back of a car with her first girlfriend, no one sits her down, as they did in Call Me By Your Name, for a cosy chat about wishing they had done something similar when they were young. Instead, an embarrassed, confused and even somewhat penitent Cameron is packed off by her evangelical aunt and uncle to God’s Promise, a religious ‘reeducation centre’ specialising in
‘In other hands this sort of story could have been hard work, but that’s not true here’
so-called gay conversion therapy.
A few months of hard work here, promise the people who run it, and Cameron will be as straight as straight can be. Her ‘miseducation’ has begun.
What they want to rid her of, explains the nice, smiley but hideously moustachioed Reverend Rick (John Gallagher Jr) is the ‘sin’ of so-called ‘SSA’ – Same Sex Attraction. They like to picture it, he goes on, as an iceberg with most of the reasons for succumbing to SSA lurking unseen below the surface.
Drawing and personalising your own iceberg is very much part of the therapeutic process at the fiercely religious centre, and ‘disciples’ are encouraged to fill them with their own reasons for apparently being gay.
But while some inmates cheerily fill theirs with ‘did too much sport with Dad’ and ‘didn’t get enough physical affection from Mom’ Cameron can’t think of anything to write. Particularly as her parents are dead. ‘Great!’ exclaim her new friends, ‘write that down, they’ll love that.’ Actually, they put it a little more bluntly than that but you get the idea. Akhavan, who co-adapts from Emily M Danforth’s novel as well as directs, gets the tone pretty much spot on. Watching the deeply unsettling narrative unfold, it’s easy to take comfort in the mistaken belief that this is an American phenomenon that couldn’t happen in this part of the world. But it has and still does, although the both the British and Irish governments are considering legislation to make such courses illegal. In other hands this sort of story could have been hard work, but that’s certainly not true here. This is a film that does have a serious point to make but it’s also funny, mildly sexy – thanks to flashbacks and the unsurprising discovery that therapy doesn’t always work – and very nicely acted. Moretz is a revelation, in a totally convincing and beautifully understated way, as Cameron, and gets suitably downplayed support from American
Honey star Sasha Lane, as well as Forrest Goodluck, the latter playing a young Native American coming to terms with the idea that he might be what he calls ‘two-spirit’.
And keep a look out for the reliably good Jennifer Ehle, playing the centre’s super-creepy head, Dr March, who, according to canteen gossip, gained her professional reputation by ‘de-gaying her own brother’. No, it’s not her most sympathetic role.
But for all its strengths, The Miseducation Of Cameron Post does have one glaring weakness – there’s only about two-thirds of a really good film here. As a result, just when we’re expecting it to move up a gear or a two for a dramatic last lap, it suddenly comes to a weak, minor-key close. Which, after so much impressive work, is a little disappointing but after a deep breath and a moment or two’s reflection, still far from offputting.