Top LGBTQ films come from France
In May 2013, just weeks after France had legalized same-sex marriage, the Cannes jury awarded the steamy lesbian romance “Blue Is the Warmest Color” with the Palme d’Or — the most prestigious film festival honor in the world. Since then, French cinema has never been quite the same.
Coincidence or not, France in recent years has released a torrent of high-quality LGBTQ films, many of them bold, unapologetic and sexually frank — helmed both by firsttime directors and some of the coun
try’s most prominent auteurs.
This LGBTQ version of the French New Wave is in stark contrast to that of the United States, which continues to struggle to get such stories to mainstream movie screens. In the past few months alone, two new entries to this impressive French canon have arrived on U.S. shores: “Sorry Angel,” an exquisite tale about an intergenerational romance set during the AIDS era, and “Sauvage/ Wild” (opening at Bay Area theaters on Friday, May 3), a devastating profile of a male sex worker that ranks as one of the greatest films made about street hustling.
Since the approval of gay marriage in the United States in 2015, there has been no appreciable uptick in high-profile American LGBTQ movies at the multiplexes or the art houses. And the ones that have broken through the pink ceiling — all excellent films — still have an air of caution about them, as if they don’t want to upset the postcoital bliss of the landmark Supreme Court decision.
“France has a much more frank approach to sexuality in cinema,” said Marcus Hu, whose Strand Releasing has distributed a number of the French offerings. “Filmmakers in America are very chaste about sexuality — gay or straight.”
For example, “Moonlight,” the deserved winner of the 2016 best picture Oscar, featured a black gay man as the central character, but his sexuality is dealt with primarily in an elliptical manner. Indeed, the highly affecting film is more of an examination of black masculinity and urban malaise than anything else.
Likewise, the charming 2018 movie “Love, Simon,” about a gay high school boy in search of love, waits until the final two minutes for our hero
to get his first real kiss from a secret admirer. Much of this enjoyable film focuses on Simon’s relationships with his straight friends and family. This was not an accident; it was a marketing strategy.
The most daring mainstream LGBTQ American film in recent years has been “Call Me by Your Name,” a formidable movie about a precocious 17-year-old boy who falls for his father’s 24-year-old graduate assistant. It’s revealing that the film had an Italian director, a European setting and some French financial backing. Still, “Call Me by Your Name” was careful not to push too many boundaries. Screenwriter James Ivory, who garnered an Oscar for his work adapting it from a novel, told the Guardian that his script called for the main characters to be shown fully nude in certain scenes. In another interview with Variety, Ivory called the decision to forgo frontal nudity “a pity” and an “American attitude.”
The directors of these films would undoubtedly argue — and justifiably so — that their decisions were an aesthetic, not an “attitude,” but it’s hard to deny that if they had brought a different, bolder aesthetic, their films probably would never have been made in the first place.
This predicament was on full display in the multiple Oscar winner “Bohemian Rhapsody,” which sanitized Freddie Mercury’s gay life to the point where some critics challenged the film’s authenticity, Rami Malek’s electric performance notwithstanding. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the movie cleaned up at the box office, and we will never know whether “Rhapsody” would have been successful had it presented a truer version of Mercury. But if past patterns are any indication — and there are few signs that the status quo is changing in any meaningful way — Hollywood is likely to continue treating LGBTQ stories as if they were box office poison.
To be fair, the powers that be in Tinseltown are not making these decisions in a vacuum. They must operate in a country with a strong puritanical heritage, where the landscape is dotted with “family values” groups at the ready to protest LGBTQ content. And let’s face it: American movie audiences in general are more comfortable with violence than sexuality, let alone LGBTQ sexuality.
With the exception of Europe, LGBTQ content can even be more complicated for an American film in the international markets, where some nations won’t hesitate to censor the movies or ban them altogether. In an era where Hollywood is thinking more about the global market than ever before, this matters to the people who are concerned about a production's bottom line.
And if studios thought that LGBTQ work could make piles of money like superhero films do, they would be the first in line to green-light these projects. Yet even with all the mitigating circumstances, movie executives often go overboard in avoiding financial risks, a self-fulfilling prophecy that doesn’t give the audience a chance to evolve.
As American cinema maintains its sexually squeamish ways, France keeps churning out LGBTQ-themed films that have that certain je ne sais quoi. In addition to “Sorry Angel,” and “Sauvage/Wild,” which both premiered at Cannes, some of the many notable titles include “Stranger by the Lake,” a haunting story in which a cruising area is stalked by a serial killer; “Being 17,” a powerful coming-of-age story directed by the legendary Andre Techine; and “Summertime,” a romantic lesbian drama.
Unlike their American counterparts, French filmmakers don’t have to worry that their audiences will be offended by sexual images, and directors there are generally not governed by political correctness, for better or worse. They just make the films they want, without constraint, and that freedom shows up on the big screen with LGBTQ stories and characters that are all the more authentic. None of these films are blockbusters, but they are making cinematic waves — and will be studied and re-watched in the years to come.
The LGBTQ experience, of course, is much more than sexuality, and being merely bold or unapologetic is not a panacea to presenting the full human range of the LGBTQ experience — whether it’s family friendly or something more adult — at the theaters. But it’s a shame that mainstream American movies are reflexively denying complex aspects of LGBTQ lives, which is hardly a recipe for engaging cinema.
For now, the French will have to lead the way.