To a queer woman going to the movies, it may seem as if there has been something in the ether for the past year. First, in August, there was “Bottoms.” Then “Drive-Away Dolls” arrived in February. “Love Lies Bleeding” joined the fray in March. This cluster of relatively mainstream films about queer women, deliciously frothy and fun to watch, feels unprecedented.
It isn’t, of course — film always has a precedent. But the latest titles are different. These movies lean into camp: heightened realities, suspended disbelief, larger-than-life plots. What’s more, queer women had a significant hand in crafting each release, and none of the movies involve coming-out stories. Their protagonists are already out, living their lives, committing crimes along the way.
“I don’t think that these three films, even taken individually, could have quite existed in the pretty mainstream public sphere even a few years ago,” said Clara Bradbury-Rance, a film scholar and the author of “Lesbian Cinema After Queer Theory.” “At what point,” she added, “do you reach a sense that lesbians are represented enough to represent them in their badness and toxicity and irritation?”
“Bottoms” follows two lesbian high school seniors, PJ (Rachel Sennott) and Josie (Ayo Edebiri), who start a fight club (sorry, self-defense club) as a ruse to hook up with cheerleaders. “Drive-Away Dolls” is a crime caper about unsuspecting friends, Jamie (Margaret Qualley) and Marian (Geraldine Viswanathan), who find a mysterious package in the trunk of their car during a road trip. And in “Love Lies Bleeding,” Jackie (Katy O’Brian), an ambitious bodybuilder, comes to town and falls for Lou (Kristen Stewart), a gym manager with a shadowy past.
With their offbeat B-movie feel, these stories are “managing to mess with this dichotomy between the good representation and the bad representation,” Bradbury-Rance said, allowing us to think, “there are ways of finding pleasure in ambivalence and ambiguity and tension.”
These films are part of a recent larger wave of lesbian stories that includes “Tár,” “Nyad,” “The Color Purple” and “Silver Haze,” and they stand in stark contrast to another recent cluster: the period dramas of the late 2010s. Think: “Carol,” “The Favourite,” “Portrait of a Lady on Fire” and “Ammonite.” Andrea Torres, one of the programmers behind the recent Sapph-o-Rama series at Film Forum in Manhattan, referred to this as the “lesbian saints era.” It even had its own “Saturday Night Live” sketch: “Lesbian period drama,” went the tagline. “You get one a year — make the most of it.”
Now, though, we have three films in one year. “Bottoms,” in particular, with its depiction of PJ and Josie as not necessarily good people, shows that maybe “there’s something snappy or spiky about queer life,” as Bradbury-Rance put it. Instead of claiming that lesbian films are about a universal desire, these are specific stories about queer life, with its own grooves and complexities.
This spiky representation — which features sex and violence, as well as sometimes fraught, not-always-happy endings — recalls the New Queer Cinema of the early 1990s, a wave of independent filmmaking that included “The Hours and Times,” “Swoon” and “The Living End.” But B. Ruby Rich, the critic who coined the movement’s name, noted back then, “Surprise, all the new movies being snatched up by distributors, shown in mainstream festivals, booked into theaters, are by the boys.”
IN HER TIME as the coordinator of gender and sexuality studies at Swarthmore College, Patricia White, author of “Uninvited: Classical Hollywood Cinema and Lesbian Representability,” has taught plenty of students. When she shows them older work, they often expect realism, but when she shows more modern fare, nobody is fazed by lesbian vampires, sci-fi or superheroes.
Commercial and genre film tropes like these — combined with the creativity of this generation of queer women filmmakers — make for movies “that are very imaginative and very pastiche-y and not realist,” she said. “And not necessarily feel-good either, not quote-unquote positive — and that’s part of the fun, too.”
She said these films can raise the question: “What’s the social mayhem that my desire could unleash? Or what kind of narrative possibilities and twists and turns are possible” if you don’t stick to heterosexual formulas? The possibilities, she said, include “emotional, creative affirmations that are not just those of ‘I see myself.’”
“Bottoms,” “Drive-Away Dolls” and “Love Lies Bleeding” straddle an odd line: They are all “pastiche-y,” as White put it, drawing from John Hughes, John Waters, the campy 2000 comedy “But I’m a Cheerleader,” the platonic love story “Go Fish” from 1994, and film noir. And they are, to varying degrees, satirical as well. But they take themselves seriously as channels for a whole host of emotions, including the messy ones.
The archivist and documentarian Jenni Olson has been in the lesbian film world for decades, and pointed out that “every few years, there are these little bursts. And there are these little moments of, like, ‘It’s a thing!’ And like, ‘Does this mean that finally there will be more?’ And I always have a combination of optimism — it is really exciting — and skepticism that Hollywood is Hollywood.”
For queer women in the industry, the idea that the tide is actually turning is often met with hesitation. “I think it’s clear that studios have recognized that there’s an audience for this,” said Torres, the Sapph-o-Rama co-programmer. “It’s like an ouroboros or some soul-crushing cycle of: Is this for us? Or are they doing this because they see that there’s lucrative” potential?
Torres and her colleague Emily Greenberg programmed the 30-film series at Film Forum in February. Their picks went as far back as 1929 (“The Wild Party”) all the way up to 2004 (“Saving Face”). What feels different now “is that it does seem like there are more actual lesbians tied and attached to the projects,” Torres said. “And I think a wider audience as well,” Greenberg added, referring to viewers who aren’t necessarily queer.
Allegra Madsen, the executive director of Frameline, the organization behind the San Francisco International LGBTQ+ Film Festival, watched as the current wave of lesbian film bubbled up for a few years on the festival circuit. She noted that there are many more lesbian stories than she’s ever seen, adding, “A lot of these are about control over your body and seizing bodily autonomy. And in a moment when that is definitely under threat, it seems like this could be a cultural response.”
But, she said, “I love this moment of, yeah, this is serious, but we’re also going to have a good damn time.”
THE QUESTION PERSISTS, THOUGH: Why is the industry more open to these films right now? What is making it possible for filmmakers — especially queer women — to get the green light?
For Rose Glass, the director of “Love Lies Bleeding,” which she wrote with Weronika Tofilska, it was actually quite simple. She had just worked with the British film production company Film4 and the American indie studio A24 on her feature directorial debut, “Saint Maud” (2021), and they were ready to support her next piece.
“What I noticed about these three films, specifically, is also that they’re all funny and light,” Glass said. “But inevitably, I think a lot of the discussion around it is very somber. And I think what puts a lot of people off, particularly if they’re not queer themself — people get very defensive and get this idea that it’s about ticking boxes, or some kind of ‘eat your greens’ sort of thing, which is bollocks.”
Emma Seligman, who directed “Bottoms” and wrote its screenplay alongside Sennott, had a tougher time getting the film picked up. Her critically acclaimed debut, “Shiva Baby,” was not yet in theaters when she sent around the “Bottoms” script. There were so many no’s — and then one singular yes, from Alana Mayo, another queer woman, at Orion Pictures.
Queer films “always were considered cult classics,” Seligman said, “because they weren’t marketed to a broad, mainstream audience. And so then queer people had to discover them over the years. And I think that now we’re in an era of cult classics happening immediately. Because they might not do super well at the box office, but the audience who it’s intended for will discover it immediately, simply because of social media.”
Like Seligman, Ethan Coen, soloing as a director after working for years with his brother Joel, had a hard time getting “Drive-Away Dolls” off the ground with his wife and co-writer, Tricia Cooke. They wrote the script in the early 2000s, shopped it around in 2006 or 2007, and just couldn’t get anyone interested. That changed drastically in 2022, when Focus Features was completely receptive.
“I think they’re filling a void,” Cooke said. “We’ve never had lesbian comedies, or not many. And the time was ripe.” Coen quipped, “Everybody should have their stupid movies.” And now, finally, we do.
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