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2010 Year in Review: Movies

Julianne Moore. Natalie Portman. Annette Bening. A few years ago, no one would have dreamed that such big, bankable names would be involved in pushing lesbian-inclusive cinema to the major studio mainstream, perhaps even to the promised land of the Oscars. But here we are at the end of 2010, and the future has never looked brighter.

With one truly breakout film, The Kids Are All Right, and high-profile projects including The Runaways, Black Swan, and the Millennium Trilogy, it seems that that queer female lead characters have finally made it into the cinematic forefront. Perhaps it’s only a toehold, but it’s a welcome trend, considering big-screen lesbians have most typically been portrayed as serial killers (Monster, Basic Instinct) or minor characters.

The lesbian movies are all right

For years, the lesbian movie-watching community has been waiting for “Dykeback Mountain” – that is, our own mainstream breakout in the vein of 2005’s cowboy romance Brokeback Mountain. This year, that film finally came in the form of The Kids Are All Right, a Sundance darling that made major waves when it was released to wide acclaim across the country.

Here was the first mainstream movie to focus on a lesbian relationship, starring A-List talent in the form of Julianne Moore and Annette Bening, who play a happy couple with two teens, and Mark Ruffalo in a key supporting role. AE reviewer Dorothy Snarker adored the film, though it certainly caused outrage within the community for the inclusion of a “sleeping with a man” plot point. Snarker countered with a reasoned analysis and a genuine appreciation for the film’s handling of the subject matter:

Much has been made about how The Kids Are All Right could be the lesbian Brokeback Mountain. The beauty of Ang Lee’s heartbreaking masterpiece was that it made Midwestern housewives leave the theater saying, “Gosh, I sure wish those gay cowboys could have worked things out.”

The genius of The Kids Are All Right is that it makes everyone leave the theater saying, “I sure hope that nice couple can work it out.”

Julianne Moore also played gay (or bi) in Chloe — a film that reviewer Lesley Goldberg called “a thriller that gets stuck on its way to the payoff somewhere in Lesbian Stunt Casting Ville” – and The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, in which she played the naughty partner of the protagonist’s aunt.

Ms. Moore may have played queer women even more than she played it straight in recent movies. Not that we’re counting.

Elsewhere in the cineplex during 2010, Noomi Rapace turned heads with her magnetic performance as bisexual badass Lisbeth in the Swedish film, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (originally released in 2009 in Europe). The first installment in the Millennium Trilogy, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is an astoundingly well-crafted, intense murder mystery that was surely one of the best suspense films of 2010.

It doesn’t hurt that the lead character is a smart, strong, utterly fierce woman named Lisbeth was the real star of the story. Though she’s partnered with a male journalist, Lisbeth does all of the heavy lifting, and is eventually the one who figures it all out. Our own Trish Bendix called Lisbeth a “feminist icon” in her review. The sequel, The Girl Who Played with Fire, was even more inclusive, with pivotal scenes between Lisbeth and her on-again, off-again girlfriend, Miriam. The third film, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, is currently in limited release. A Hollywood remake of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is now in production, so US audiences will be getting even more Lisbeth in 2011.

Just as dark, and perhaps even more high-profile, was Darren Aronofsky‘s thriller Black Swan, starring Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis as dancers in a hyper-competitive ballet company. With its stellar performances and an intense, unwavering tone, reviewer Lesley Goldberg called the film “captivating.” While the movie is currently in limited release, expect the Oscar buzz (especially for Portman), to keep Black Swan relevant well into the New Year.

In the beginning of 2010, Kristen Stewart and Dakota Fanning rocked their mullets hard on the big screen as the more-than-just-friends younger versions of Joan Jett and Cherie Currie in The Runaways, and Tilda Swinton‘s buttoned-up matriarch in I Am Love got a wild surprise upon learning that her youngest child, Betta, is a lesbian.

Though she isn’t the protagonist, baby dyke Betta is integral to the plot as the catalyst for Emma’s own reawakening. As Grace Chu says in her review:

Although Betta has very little screen time, she plays a pivotal role in her mother’s emotional awakening. When Emma by chance comes across a note from Betta to Edo in which Betta confesses that she has fallen in love with a woman, you can see the dusty gears start creaking in Emma’s mind. “Feelings? What are they? And can I have some too?”

The Real World If there was a commonality in the year’s documentaries, it was exposing and fighting hard against injustice. While this theme is often documentary fodder, nothing kicked ass harder or took more names than 8: The Mormon Proposition, an uncompromising look at the Mormon Church’s involvement in California’s historic, tragic passage of Proposition 8, which banned same sex marriage in the state.

With top names like Milk screenwriter, Dustin Lance Black, prominent lawmakers, heartfelt personal stories, and a damning investigation into the money trail that financed the proposition, it was one of the most potent, vital LGBT films of the last 10 years.

Much more personal, but no less powerful, was For My Wife, a film about the heartbreaking journey of Charlene Strong, following the tragic loss of her partner, Kate, after a freak accident. Because of her subsequent mistreatment because of anti-gay policies, Strong lived up to her name and testified before Washington State lawmakers just a month after Kate’s death. The move really helped to seal the deal for domestic partner benefits in the state.

She didn’t stop there – she took her story on the road and, hey – made a movie about it, and now spends her time spreading the good word for marriage equality. For My Wife is a sobering, tear-jerking piece of filmmaking. Desi Girls provided a rare, intimate look at the experiences of queer South Asian-American women – the “Desi” girls of the title. By interviewing and following three very different women from the community (including Desi party promoter, DJ Ashu) and comparing their experiences, the film entered the tricky intersection of sexual orientation, gender and cultural background that make up an individual’s (and a community’s) sense of identity.

Bucking the super-serious trend to some degree was Topp Twins: Untouchable Girls, which covers the entire history of New Zealand’s top comedy act: a yodeling, sketch-performing, lesbian set of twins. The examination of a heartbreaking bout with cancer and the twins’ passionate involvement with social justice causes kept the film from just being one big fluffy party.

The camp stamp

In stark contrast to the drama that ran through the year’s biggest lesbian-inclusive documentaries and studio titles, 2010’s smaller indie films saw a distinct trend towards camp – or, at the least, a playful tone and tendency towards off-kilter humor.

Nowhere was this more evident than in Drool, a candy-colored dark comedy featuring Laura Harring as Anora, a battered southern housewife who dreams (literally) of a better life, and idolizes her pig-headed husband. When Anora kills him semi-accidentally, she and her perky new best friend/girlfriend Imogene (Jill Marie Jones), take the kids on the world’s weirdest road trip, featuring a corpse, a load of neon-hued Slurpee ice, and a metric ton of loud makeup. It was a weird and wonderful journey that would make John Waters proud.

The campy trend continued with the off-kilter burlesque romp, Fishnet, a hilarious, faux-documentary about the porn industry called, Love Shack and the babes-with-boobs of Bitch Slap. Bitch Slap tried (perhaps too hard) to bring back the B-movie genre, with ridiculous action, over-the-top violence, and girl-on-girl action aplenty. AfterEllen.com contributing writer Dorothy Snarker summed up the two possible audience reactions to the flick with lines from the movie: “I’ll let the movie dialogue speak for itself here. Either: ‘This is crazy. I’ve had enough. I want to go home,’ or, ‘Don’t ever apologize for being you.'”

Another film, My Normal, also veered into mildly campy territory, taking a truly novel story premise and running with it. The story of Jessica, a successful lesbian dominatrix that dreams of becoming a filmmaker, the film was actually reasonably poignant and handled with a light touch.

While the “Dommy” side of Jessica’s personality comes into play in the camped-up “love” scenes, she’s really a sweet, well-adjusted girl with a loving family and a hot girlfriend who’s not so keen on her chosen profession.

Arguably the year’s absolute best indie, Bloomington, served up an incredibly hot romance on a bed of quirky humor. The story of an ex-child star who seeks a “normal” life by going to college in Indiana, instead finds intrigue (and ridiculously hot sex) with a lusty psychology professor. It was sexy and magical from beginning to end.

The offbeat The Baby Formula took the most tired cliché of all, the pregnant lesbian, and turned it completely on its head, with a little help from a mild sci-fi premise and impressive acting from its two leads. Refreshingly different and genuine, it offered the opposite experience of watching, say, 2008’s Tick Tock Lullaby. Slamdance/Sundance pick, The Four Faced Liar, featured a steamy queer romance in the middle of four 20-something New Yorkers’ quarter-life crisis. Fabulous acting, led by writer and star Marja Lewis Ryan, a tight script, and a refusal to bow to clichés, made this one of the most polished indie releases of the year.

Not as successful was Elena Undone, which, despite having veteran lesbian director Nicole Conn (Claire of the Moon), two fantastic leads (Necar Zadegan and Traci Dinwiddie), and the longest screen kiss in movie history, proved a bit too melodramatic for my liking. The lovely, unexpected romance between a preacher’s wife and a lesbian novelist was brought down by some bizarre soundtrack choices, heavy-handed writing and an annoying “love guru” character.

A Marine Story suffered a similar fate – the uneven script just couldn’t keep up with the well-meaning and timely narrative about a gung-ho female Marine discharged under the US military’s “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” policy.

The hardest film to categorize this year was Cheryl Dunye‘s experimental thriller The Owls, which stands for “Older, Wiser Lesbians” and stars lesbian film icons Guinevere Turner, V.S. Brodie and Dunye herself as friends who accidentally kill a woman (Deak Evgenikos, The Itty Bitty Titty Committee) at a party.

While the film was intriguing, it’s more interesting to note the meta-narrative: The Owls was really a meditation on just how far we’ve come in lesbian cinema over the last two decades. Mixing the talent that made Go Fish and Watermelon Woman with “next generation” indie favorites like Evgenikos and Skyler Cooper, it essentially charted the evolution of lesbian film from its humble roots to today’s bigger and more complex scene. As we close out the first decade of the ‘aughts, it’s clear that queer women have made progress on the silver screen. In 2000, most of the movies about lesbians were smaller films made by first-time directors on shoestring budgets, and the “coming out story” was the plotline of choice.

In 2010, a movie about your average, next-door lesbian neighbors got so much coverage in the mainstream press that straight co-workers and family members were happily chatting it up and hoping that Kids moms, Jules and Nic, could patch things up. A queer (or questioning) ballerina is leading the charge for Oscar inclusion. And a bisexual badass with great ink has turned so many heads that David Fincher and the Hollywood machine are bringing their own adaptation of her story to the silver screen.

Complement this sort of mainstream attention with a plethora of better-than-average and increasingly diverse suite of indie films and documentaries, and you have a banner year for women who love women in movies. Here’s to the next decade of progress, and to the talent that continues to push the envelope in Hollywood, at indie festivals, and in YouTube-enabled basement studios.

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