by Ryan Silberstein, Managing Editor, and Tessa Swehla, Staff Writer
Everyone loves a good old-fashioned forbidden upstairs-downstairs (or in this case, first class-steerage) romance.
by Ryan Silberstein, Managing Editor, Red Herring
Combining cutting-edge technology with classic, earnest storytelling is firmly the hallmark of this series, and it honestly gave me almost everything I wanted from it.
by Jaime Davis, The Fixer
Mare of Easttown is over, my homesickness remains.
Written and directed by Francis Lee
Starring Kate Winslet, Saoirse Ronan, Gemma Jones, and Fiona Shaw
Running time 2 hours
MPAA rating: R for longing looks and lesbian love
by Jaime Davis, The Fixer
There are countless historical lesbian melodramas out there in the world, like the gorgeous Carol, perfect The Handmaiden, and the exquisite Portrait of a Lady on Fire, just to name a select few. And now in 2020, there’s Ammonite, blazing bright with the star power of Saoirse Ronan and Kate Winslet, beautiful in its gray melancholia, but lacking much in the way of feeling behind the central tale. I’m not even going to attempt to discuss why there are so many lesbian period films, because this piece by Kira Deshler in Screen Queens provides theories far superior to anything I could ever cobble together. Deshler argues that many of these (mainstream) films exist because of a potent combination of audience tastes, beauty, and aesthetics. Studios are keen to produce these films as they’re commonly considered less sexually explicit while their disconnection from the current time period allows for a lack of overt political commentary, hence them being safer choices at the box office. Basically, what we’re left with are movies about sad white women in restrictive clothing falling in love and fumbling with petticoats.
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