Portrait of an Ammonite to Come: Disambiguating the "Lesbian Period Drama" (and Looking Beyond It)
White lesbian period dramas are not our only option (and even they aren't all created equal)
A few weekends ago, Saturday Night Live featured a sketch called “Lesbian Period Drama,” a fake movie trailer that mostly parodies Ammonite, the recent film about the theorized romance between paleontologist Mary Anning (Kate Winslet) and geologist Charlotte Murchison (Saoirse Ronan). This sketch, starring Carey Mulligan and Heidi Gardner as The Lesbians, is a largely accurate, genuinely funny checklist of everything that is, unfortunately, trite about the movie. However, the joke is pretty much tanked by one thing: it drags Portrait of a Lady on Fire into it.
When the trailer for Ammonite dropped, my Twitter timeline was inundated with a lot of the same take: “Here we go again, another seaside period drama about white lesbians” – “another” apparently meaning the second in two years, after Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire. There were those who rightfully pointed out that we’re not exactly swimming in these types of movies, but the root of the problem seems to be that a lot of the people making the comparison were less interested in the real criticisms to be made about what LGBTQ+ films get to have a spotlight, and more concerned with being in on the joke.
“Lesbian Period Drama” thinks it’s in on that joke, stating that the pretend film (which is, again, mostly a riff on Ammonite) comes from the studio that brought you Ammonite and Portrait of a Lady on Fire. Further, the description for the sketch on YouTube reads, “From the makers of Portrait of a Lady on Fire and The Favourite.” One writeup of the sketch chose to apply it to Blue is the Warmest Color and Atomic Blonde. These are all pretty different movies with some overlapping tropes, the most glaring similarity being that they’re all about white women (which the sketch doesn’t even bother to include in its jabs). The whole thing reads like nobody is actually seeing these movies, or we’re just too comfortable generalizing any movie featuring women who aren’t straight.
“Okay but Cameron, it’s SNL, it’s really not that deep,” I hear you saying, and sure, you have a point. But consider the sketch a prepackaged example of what has gone wrong with the way we think of queer representation in media. Some of the lines of trailer narration include, “Starring two straight actresses who dared not to wear makeup,” and, “A sex scene so graphic, you’ll think, ‘oh, right, a man directed this.’” This is more or less applicable to Ammonite, but Adèle Haenel, the titular Lady on Fire, is very much not a straight actress. Sciamma, not a man or straight either, has directed a body of work that centers women and explores gender and sexuality. I don’t think it’s out of line to say that they deserve a little better than having their film lumped into this premise.
On the one hand, I do see how we could end up here. Ammonite came and went so quickly that a pitch-perfect parody of it might be lost on wider audiences if a recent, more successful film that sounds similar on paper was not used as a point of reference. But if the “lesbian period drama” is an annual phenomenon as the sketch suggests, why not call out a different title? A friend suggested that Carol was probably the more fitting analogue, and I think they’re right. But maybe referencing a fairly beloved movie from almost six years ago, even if the shoe fits, doesn’t bolster this particular joke enough. Maybe there isn’t a whole lot of substance behind the joke to begin with.
In our haste to draw these comparisons, we may lose sight of how much we’re still playing catch-up in terms of representation, and what representation can look like to different people. Something that I noticed being left out of the remarks about Ammonite being a lesbian movie made by a man is that the man in question is Francis Lee, an openly gay director whose previous film was the gay romantic drama God’s Own Country. When Ammonite sparked criticism before it was even made, Lee took to Twitter to defend the choice to pursue the lesbian storyline despite us not knowing for certain that it happened, a response to the ways history tends to assume people were straight regardless of what evidence is available.
This isn’t to say that being gay or having good intentions inherently means Lee was the best person to tell this story or that he ultimately told it well. But it is frustrating to watch glib response after glib response pile onto a piece of media when a quick Google search, or waiting to actually see the piece of media in question, might lead to a more informed opinion. At the end of the day, Ammonite has very little in common with Portrait of a Lady on Fire, and if there really is a trend of gloomy, white lesbian period dramas, it may already be dwindling. When I saw The World to Come through Sundance this year, I wondered if it would be positioned as the next of these movies, but it has since gone even more quietly into the night than its predecessor. (Please forgive me for still using it to round out the title of this post.)
If the platform for a movie like Ammonite is unearned, and you’re a cis, white queer who needs to tweet about it, consider tossing in a better recommendation along with your hot take. Let’s not play into the idea that a studio’s Big Gay Film of the Year is all we’ve got, and so we must either praise it to the high heavens or set fire to it. It’s interesting that the “Lesbian Period Drama” ends on, “You get one a year. Make the most of it.” We get one of this specific thing we’re making fun of a year? Why would we want to scrape that one thing for a dose of queer content when we could pick something else?
Most major streaming platforms have an LGBTQ+ category now, but most of them aren’t very good at promoting the new films they add to those sections. Dig into those sections. Read up on some movies and decide for yourself if you think you’ll enjoy them. Check your library’s offerings, ask your friends what they’re watching, and if you have a platform, use it to share the hidden gems you find. Pay attention to your queer, trans, and non-white friends who are already making a point to boost the voices of their favorite creators. Not everything that moves the needle forward is going to resonate with everyone, and not everything that resonates with you is going to work for everyone. But you owe it to yourself to see what’s out there.
Thanks for reading, and I’ll leave you here with some of my own favorites from the last year or so:
Alice Júnior (Netflix) and Cowboys (VOD), two movies about young trans characters played by young trans actors! In the former, Alice longs for her first kiss while also having to adjust to a new school, and in the latter, Joe escapes into nature with his supportive, but troubled dad.
Birds of Prey (HBO Max) and The Old Guard (Netflix), which are not exactly hidden gems, but it’s still really cool that two big comic book movies that managed to hit screens last year featured explicitly queer characters as part of their primary ensembles.
The Half of It and Straight Up (both on Netflix), two Film Independent Spirit Award nominees, for Best Screenplay and Best First Screenplay, respectively. I watched a panel that included Alice Wu and James Sweeney, during which Sweeney thanked Wu for Saving Face, a movie that was a big inspiration to him. I cried! That’s what “representation matters” means. As for their films, The Half of It is a lovingly told coming of age story and was my favorite movie of last year, and Straight Up is a cheeky comedy about an unconventional relationship that explores discomforts around sex and sexuality that was really refreshing to see.
Ma Belle, My Beauty (TBD), the better queer movie I saw at Sundance. A little meandering, but hey, it’s summer in the South of France. A nice little bit of poly rep, and some charmingly realistic sex scenes.
Before Crazy Rich Asians, Henry Golding did some crazy hot making out with Parker Sawyers in Monsoon (Netflix), a really lovely movie about a young man who returns to Vietnam to scatter his parents’ ashes. He reconnects with the place he was forced to leave as a child, and finds new love along the way.
In Unpregnant (HBO Max), Barbie Ferreira and Betty Who frolic through a funhouse to the tune of a Maggie Rogers song. In Shiva Baby (VOD), Rachel Sennott weaves through a less fun house, trapped at a family gathering with her ex-girlfriend, her sugar daddy, and his wife.