The best WLW movie I saw at Outfest was Saint Frances, by a mile. Written by Kelly O’Sullivan, Saint Frances follows Bridget (also played by Sullivan), a directionless thirty-something who picks up a job nannying for a wealthy lesbian couple. We follow Bridget through the trials and tribulations of her own dating life, an abortion, and her relationship to love and intimacy as stacked against the couple she’s nannying for. What I loved most about this movie — besides the wit and the charm of its lead youngin’, Frances (Ramona Edith Williams) — was how it positioned queerness. Saint Frances normalizes its queerness, positioning it in the foreground of the film without tokenizing it. That doesn’t mean it’s an uncomplicated subject, and for me, that’s the sweet spot of queer representation: Normalized and realistic, but not erased.
And that, to me, highlights an important distinction about arguments being made for a new kind of queer narrative, one that moves past coming out stories. At first, such arguments insinuated, to me, the idea that queerness isn’t important enough to be talked about, or that downplaying queerness in queer narratives means we don’t want to talk about the hard realities of being a queer woman today. But if queerness becomes so normalized in a story that it’s depicted as ubiquitous or ever-present, like in Saint Frances, that’s a win for representation in my eyes.
Another movie that I (sort of) enjoyed was The Ground Beneath My Feet, a German psycho-thriller about a businesswoman, Lola (Valerie Pachner), her affair with her boss Elise (Mavie Hörbiger), and Lola’s psychotic break amidst dealing with her older sister’s schizophrenia. In this movie, like in Saint Frances, queerness wasn’t the main narrative — rather, it was merely present, a backdrop to tell another narrative. Lola’s story wasn’t that she was queer; it was that she was falling behind in a cutthroat professional world, a world where queerness is visible, normal, not the main issue. We don’t need to discuss that she’s queer, but we’re also not minimizing that either woman is queer, and how that fits into their lives as businesswomen (like when a prospective male client inappropriately hits on Lola in front of Elise).
