THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – TO SEE
England 1988: in the midst of Thatcher’s era, “Section 28” has just been enacted. This is an amendment preventing schools and public authorities from making “the promotion of the acceptability of homosexuality as a so-called family relationship”. The law would not be repealed until 2003. Section 28 had, according to director Georgia Oakley, devastating effects on an entire generation, creating a culture of silence and shame within the homosexual community.
It is this omerta that hits hard Jean, a sports teacher in a school, who carefully conceals her sexual orientation for fear of losing her job. It is at night, in a lesbian bar, a veritable protective cocoon magnified by the use of the 16 millimeter format, that Jean can finally drop the mask in the middle of an underground fauna frolicking to new wave refrains – let’s salute here the accuracy of the reconstruction, quite irreproachable.
Exhausting moral dilemmas
Blue Jean thus circulates between several spaces: the work, the bar and the apartment of his heroine, an area that one might think protected from view if the neighbor opposite were not so suspicious and if it was not necessary that the young woman hides her girlfriend every time someone knocks on the door. All she has to do is set foot outside, turn on the TV or the radio for the repressive context to remind her and invade more than her intimacy, her entire psyche. Everything gets complicated when, against a backdrop of homophobic revenge, Lois Jackson, a student who everyone guesses is a lesbian, is wrongly accused of having sexually assaulted one of her classmates. Jean must choose between defending the student at the risk of being unmasked herself, or hiding in the sand to save her secret.
Oakley solves the dilemma with finesse: far from endowing her heroine with a halo of moral purity, she chooses to show how Jean is driven to transform her daily life into a series of exhausting moral dilemmas and bad decisions. Her moral distress and her beautiful moments of absence owe a great deal to Rosy McEwen, a splendid technical actress trained at the theater of the Old Vic, and who charges her character with frank opacity.
Above all, Blue Jean manages to avoid the pitfalls that too often lie in wait for LGBT fiction, the “film about” which observes reality through the prism of a single societal concern: instead of being a space where meaning opens up and becomes more complex, fiction retracts to become only the standard-bearer of identity claims. Blue Jean does not avoid the pitfall, he does better by deciding to push the subject’s monomania to its limits, to paranoia: nothing exists except the fear of being unmasked. A lesbian in a straight world, Jean can only be a double agent. It is this permanent tension instilled in each scene that allows Oakley to emancipate herself from the literalness of the coming out narrative to lose her heroine inside a beautiful spy film.
You have 2.65% of this article left to read. The following is for subscribers only.