Directed By Women: Love Lies Bleeding (2024)

By Andrea Thompson

I do love a good change of pace, and after the sweetness of the platonic girl bonds of my prior column, “Love Lies Bleeding” is most definitely that.

A thrillingly twisted, subversive crime tale of blood, love, and murder that embraces the beautifully surrealist absurdity of letting your freak flags fly with a lover who sees the beauty in your darkest darkness, it’s one of the best A24 thrillers I’ve seen, and will likely have a place on my best films of 2024.

Directed and co-written by Rose Glass, who made a splash with her 2019 horror movie “Saint Maud,” it isn’t content to merely delve into the ugliness of each and every character on-screen, it reminds us how such monstrosities are made. The 80’s setting certainly doesn’t hurt in this respect, and “Love Lies Bleeding” takes such care to hammer home who runs this rot-infested vision of America that a kid shows up in a Reagan mask pretty promptly.

Overwrought metaphors aside, I do love a movie that allows its female characters to be truly fucked up. Yes, women love stories which revolve around those of us who triumph over their circumstances and improve themselves by doing the right thing against all odds, or acting as an avatar of hope when things are at their lowest. But we also love throwing likability out the window and letting women get messy, brutal and complicated.

In other words? We can cheer for Wonder Woman and Harley Quinn; it doesn’t have to be mutually exclusive.

Likewise, depictions of lesbian relationships don’t always have to veer into utopian territory. There are indicators that Lou (Kristen Stewart) is trying to shed the toxicity in her life before she ever encounters homeless aspiring bodybuilder Jackie (Katy O'Brian), what with her listening to audio pronouncements on the dangers of smoking as she lights up a cig, and when she first appears she’s literally up in shit at the gym she works at, a clear indicator that things are about to go down.

Denial runs deep though, since shortly after Lou meets Jackie, she not only introduces her to steroids, but teaches her how to put them to use. It’s taken for granted in the relationship they quickly start, with Jackie moving in shortly after and their whirlwind romance spiraling into a tornado by the end. At least it’s a sparkling thing of beauty. 

Lou is also the one who unwittingly gets Jackie involved in her complicated family life. We all bring our baggage to relationships, but when your father (Ed Harris being convincingly scary) is a vicious local crime lord with a high body count, there’s a damn good chance things will get messy fairly quickly.  

And does it ever. Don’t take steroids kids, because you might take it a bit too seriously. When Lou says she wishes her sister Beth’s (Jena Malone) abusive husband JJ (a nearly unrecognizable hicked up Dave Franco) would die, Jackie takes matters into her own hands, literally, and beats the guy to death with them. Whoa.

Even if you also have the most supportive girlfriend ever, the kind who has a working knowledge of how to dispose of a body that points the finger at someone else, it tends to leave some kind of mark. And shockingly, Jackie’s steroid use spirals to the point where even Lou becomes somewhat afraid of her, even becoming the victim of some domestic violence herself as Jackie begins to come apart.

A24

Much like any story of organized crime worth its salt, everyone in its orbit is enabling a monster in some way, and getting whacked is a big possibility. It’s the feminine duality of Meadow versus Adriana in “The Sopranos”: you either enable and victimize, or you become the victim. In “Love Lies Bleeding,” Lou’s sister Beth (Jena Malone) is the avatar for this particular truth, with her refusal to leave her abusive husband even after he beats her to a bloody pulp and standing firmly with her father when things go awry.

What makes Lou and Jackie worth rooting for isn’t merely their status as main characters who become anti-heroines, but the fact that they are rooted in their love and acceptance of each other. Jackie might even say near the end she wishes she never met Lou, but the two are twisted soul mates by then, and even the death and disposal of a mostly innocent bystander won’t change that. 

Who knows? With the slate mostly scrubbed clean of any and all enemies, they are the ones who may even become something healthy…ish. And when your girlfriend’s rage literally transforms her into a powerful giant, that’s the kind of muscle that may stand a chance against the patriarchy.

Directed By Women: Someone Great (2019)

Netflix

By Andrea Thompson

There are various ways I choose movies to watch for this column. Sometimes I love a movie so much I want to write about it and spread the joy. Sometimes I’m just curious about a movie that’s been making the rounds on the film festival circuit and want to give yet another film you know will end up on the criminally underseen and/or unappreciated pile more notice. Sometimes I want to fill in a film gap.

Others? Sometimes you need to start somewhere with a filmography, and it is definitely time to get to know more about Jennifer Kaytin Robinson. Why haven’t I already? She created “Sweet/Vicious,” a 2016 buddy comedy and rape revenge MTV series (?!!?) which was canceled after one season, she was the writer of both “Unpregnant,” “Thor: Love and Thunder,” and the director of “Do Revenge.”

Needless to say, I have some catching up to do, and I decided to start with Robin’s 2019 directorial debut “Someone Great” before she reboots the “I Know What You Did Last Summer” franchise in 2025. I could also use something lighter after last week’s column, and if this movie was a bust, well, it would at least be an enjoyable one since it was led by Gina Rodriguez, and “Jane the Virgin” will always be one of my favorite shows of all time.

Thankfully, “Someone Great” turned out to be anything but an ordeal. Rodriguez plays Jenny, a New Yorker who is at multiple crossroads in her life - she’s turning 30, about to leave the city she loves, and thus her bffs Blair (Brittany Snow) and Erin (DeWanda Wise) for her dream job at Rolling Stone in San Francisco. But the catalyst for this one last hurrah is her breakup with her boyfriend of nine years, Nate (LaKeith Stanfield).

We can all agree that LaKeith Stanfield is a lot to lose, especially if he’s one half of the kind of adorable couple that made your friends casually mention future children, and the relationship stuck for nine years. Oof. To add break to the heartbreak, Nate is the one who broke up with Jenny, which she blames on his unwillingness to attempt long distance. But the movie gets us so invested in these two that even before the full context of their breakup is revealed, we know there’s more to it than that.

Drama…but “Someone Great” is primarily about its loving female friendship trio, with Blair and Erin conveniently at crossroads of their own, with the former in an exhausting rut with her own boyfriend, and Erin still unwilling to commit to the woman she’s been seeing for four months and clearly has deeper feelings for. No, this movie isn’t reinventing a plot or a genre, but what it has going for it is its deeply felt emotional context, the kind where it turns out forever has a time limit, even when the love is still there for both parties.  

It’s a uniquely felt pain that cuts deep, and the movie’s greatest strength is how well it brings it to onscreen life. Jenny’s profession as a music journalist is also an excuse for a soundtrack that a millennial will love, and who can’t relate to hearing a song that takes us back to some of the most pivotal moments in our lives?

The thing is, even a casual fact check will prove that there are issues with the movie’s use of time and setting that go far beyond the usual questions. Is there any point to asking just how a writer can afford all this stuff? I’d say that train left that station a while back. But the music timeline actually doesn’t fully add up, Erin doesn’t seem to have any other queer friends, and the fact that her backstory is about an ex who went back to men is kind of cringe. Hell, maybe it defines cringe. 

And the whole moving to San Francisco thing, the main impetus for Jenny’s life being upended? Rolling Stone actually moved from San Francisco to New York City way back in 1977. 

For some, this will matter enough to impede their enjoyment of this movie, and I can’t say I blame them. For me? I will not ever reach the level of cool for most of it to matter, and the issues with “Someone Great” are actually pretty on brand for a movie inspired by a Taylor Swift song.

With that kind of origin story, the sum of the movie will be whether it measures up to that deeply felt emotional context, which isn’t an entirely bad thing. And as someone who is susceptible to well-written cheese (my 90s Disney childhood strikes again), the movie’s emotional reality, anchored by female friendship, had me in all my feels, to use the most readily accessible cliche. 

Take Jenny’s elegy for her and Nate’s relationship: “Unfortunately, sometimes things don’t break, they shatter. But when you let the light in, shattered glass will glitter. And in those moments, when the pieces of what we were catch the sun, I’ll remember just how beautiful it was.” 

I’ll voluntarily say it…she got me. Most of us hope we can find this kind of reconciliation with not only our broken hearts, but what comes before. How often our pride becomes the first casualty of a breakup. We too have likely begged someone not to leave us, yet somehow made it  through the painful process of realizing that something which once made us whole will break us if we don’t break it first, and clung to the desperate, barren hope that somehow it’ll all be okay, because it was before. 

It’s likely not nearly as funny as “Someone Great,” but at their best, that’s what fun scripts, performances, and comedic chemistry are for. Critics were actually warmer to the film than audiences, with the RT audience rating lagging noticeably behind, likely because “Someone Great” is kind of a stealth anti-romcom rather than one which gives us a shiny happy ending. 

The movie remains a fantastic way to get to know a talent who has been quietly yet steadily rising, having already accomplished the miraculous by getting me excited by yet another reboot. And we’ll learn more about what she did last summer come 2025.

Directed By Women: The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls in Love (1995)

Screenshot

By Andrea Thompson

We all love to glorify young love. How can we be blamed? Is there a feeling that compares to that first dizzying fall, which generally coincides with a time in our lives where adulthood encroaches but hasn’t quite taken hold in the form of rent, bills, and dependents? 

Much as we idolize youth, we often fail to take into account the complete and utter unpredictability of it, especially when that first relationship takes hold. Maria Maggenti knows though, and her 1995 film “The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls in Love” is a tender form of exorcism, a way to transform the whirlwind of emotions which accompanied her own first love into something she could finally process.

It’s a kind of artistic alchemy most are familiar with, even if only from the outside. As for Maggenti, she waits until the final ambiguous frame of high school seniors Randy Dean (Laurel Holloman) and Evie Roy (Nicole Ari Parker) for the dedication: “For my first girlfriend. May our relationship finally rest in peace.” 

By the time Maggenti has let out her cinematic sigh of relief, it’s hard to think of anyone that Randy and Evie aren’t at odds with. Friends and family alike have gotten pulled into the drama that can often result from two girls finding each other in a fairly hostile environment. 

Both of them have support systems in place that are also indicators of their respective, opposite places in life - Evie from her relatively privileged world and loving mother, and Randy with her lesbian aunt Rebecca (Kate Stafford) her aunt’s girlfriend Vicky (Sabrina Artel), along with her sole friend at school, the relatively out Frank (Nelson Edwin Rodríguez).

It’s much needed in a town so small that when Evie asks Randy where she is shortly after her arrival, Randy replies in typical teenage snark with “the middle of nowhere.” Queerness still abounds however, with Randy meeting clandestinely with Wendy (Maggie Moore) a 27-year-old married woman, along with cameos with others who are on the down low, with two women of a certain age in a hotel who ask inquiring parents if they were sent by their husbands.

Evie and Randy’s growing connection has the added baggage of young queer lovers who are finding each other in a pre-Internet rural area. It’s enough that Randy’s aunt Rebecca and Vicky end each day with a secular note of gratitude that they made it through another one, and as Evie and Randy share stories, secrets, and Walt Whitman’s “Blades of Grass,” the fact that they’ve connected with another artistic soul is enough to send them into a swoon, making everything and everyone else pale into insignificance. 

The mutual longing in a time of landlines no doubt aids in the pining as well. It’s highly doubtful that nostalgia is what Maggenti had in mind, what with the open hostility from their community, with nearly everyone feeling free to comment on Randy’s masculine appearance, and the often vicious slurs and harassment thrown her way. But the 90’s pining can hardly be avoided when characters drop period references and even confidently state that there’s no KGB anymore.

Screenshot

So when Evie and Randy’s relationship is discovered in the worst way possible, along with another academically related development Randy has been hiding, things spiral in a chaotically funny climax that brings everyone the two have relegated to side status together. By the film’s final frame, which sees them united yet ambivalently teetering on the cusp of adulthood and its complications, it’s bittersweet in its beauty.

Clearly, the two have and will leave their mark on each other. But little else is clear by the end of “The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls in Love,” other than that the process of growing up will impose other, more stifling limitations. Yet what else is first love but sweet sorrow?

Directed By Women: Not A Pretty Picture (1976)

Criterion

After a long absence during which screenings were sold out, awards announced, the FGFF column is back! And I chose a devastating one for my return with Martha Coolidge’s “Not A Pretty Picture.”

Brave is a word that's wildly overused in an industry that doesn’t just love to congratulate itself, it practically lives for it. But “Not A Pretty Picture” wasn’t only Coolidge’s 1976 feature directorial debut years before her 1983 iconic film “Valley Girl,” it was her self-created introduction to the world, one that revolved around her own rape at 16 years old, which she recreates on camera.

What exactly gave her the confidence to do it? To dare to approach a subject that we still have no idea how to even start discussing? One that was so traumatizing, it affected her to a degree that at 28 she still had never had a committed relationship with a man? 

“Not A Pretty Picture” doesn’t provide an answer. It’s a deeply personal film, yet to some degree it isn’t about Coolidge at all. As she directs the reenactments of her rape and the events that led up to it, neither she or any of the cast and crew analyze where her inspiration sprung from and how she managed to follow through on a traumatic event she only came to realize was rape four years later at age 20 with the aid of a therapist.

Rather, the analysis is reserved for why it so often comes to this, and what the film quickly reveals to be a widespread phenomenon. “Not A Pretty Picture” is both docudrama and a discussion, and what it reveals is very much what the title promises. The assault is of course disturbing in its realism, no less so for Coolidge allowing the camera’s gaze to include the crew looking on during filming. But the true brilliance is the film’s depiction of the events leading up to and surrounding it, from what it brings out in the male lead who plays Coolidge’s rapist, and the complicity of many of the women in her life.

The generation before clearly had its own baggage, and likely thought that schooling their daughters in that complicity was a form of protection. For Coolidge, making “Not A Pretty Picture” was practically a form of self defense. “My mother told me that all my life,” she recalls. “There’s no such thing as rape because you do it. You get yourself into that situation.” 

The actress playing Coolidge was also raped, and described the experience of making the film as so close to her own that she felt like “I’m not really acting.” She no doubt had to cope with other women blaming her for the attack the same as Coolidge did, with so-called friends believing the familiar story her rapist told, leaving her reputation in tatters, and later, even spitting on her and the friend who dared to stand by her, and who also plays herself. 

That it was the 70’s no doubt lent itself to such a disturbing, complex story being told so well. Experimentation on film was something of a given at the time, and both the feminist movement and independent cinema were trending. This method of analysis feels brilliant in its simplicity, that of just allowing the actors to use their own approach in the story they were telling, and keeping the cameras rolling for discussion when Coolidge says cut.

Criterion

What is really chilling isn’t only the women telling their stories; it’s how honest the men are about the psychology of rape, especially the male actor who plays Coolidge’s rapist. He’s so careful to give examples to confirm his status as one of the good ones, that it’s far more alarming and terrifying when he casually recounts his own complicity (at the very least) with his male friends, and how he unthinkingly even justifies them. How casually? In high school he would often hear of encounters that were “technically rape” but is quick to say were “not necessarily malicious,” and how college meant escalation of this type of behavior, with lists comprised of women they would refer to as “pigs.”

The real relief is near the end, where your bff not not only sticks by you, but possesses the kind of macabre sense of humor that acts as a kind of catalyst for healing. After all, it’s not everyone who can find something to giggle and celebrate about the night you get your period and realize your rapist hasn’t impregnated you. 

Yet calling “Not A Pretty Picture” ahead of its time feels not only lazy, but dangerous, an insistence that nothing has changed, even if victim blaming and the toxicity of the masculinity under discussion feel venomously familiar. The film feels very of its time in much in the way Jennifer Fox’s “The Tale,” does, another very meta story of grappling with the aftermath of sexual assault. 

But like all oversimplifications, there’s an element of truth. “The Tale” managed to find a widespread audience, while “Not A Pretty Picture” had a short-lived run in a series of art-house theaters. This film’s rediscovery isn’t merely a chance to revisit one of the bravest and most insightful movies ever made, it’s a homage to an artist who not only laid the groundwork, but carved out a long career fulfilling many of her ambitions. Many of the women with stories like Coolidge’s weren’t so lucky, but “Not A Pretty Picture” feels like a tribute to them all.

Directed By Women: Lisa Frankenstein (2024)

Focus Features

By Andrea Thompson

You wouldn’t think the latest Diablo Cody-penned vision of feminine horror would lend itself much to deep contemplation, but “Lisa Frankenstein” got me thinking about how history tends to do a lot of repeating. And not simply for the multitude of references and the nostalgic 80’s sheen of its setting.

It shouldn’t be surprising. A number of more recent movies have more than proven that a deeply feminine gaze which embraces the soft colors and the general pink of it all is actually great for horror. “The Love Witch,” “Medusa,” and another Diablo Cody gem, “Jennifer's Body,” all have proved to bring the terror right along with the often brightly lit color palette. 

The past decade does not have a monopoly on this by any means of course, as tempted as we so often are to throw up a few examples as indicators that our current era came up with any and all good ideas. No less than Agnès Varda gave us a nightmarish vision of male entitlement and its consequences wrapped in sunflowers in “Le Bonheur,” to use one example.

“Lisa Frankenstein” is a tribute to much of this history, and those who managed to create in spite of a decade which could be very unkind to women. Sure, plenty of the movies at the time seemed willing to feature some form of assault to a queasy extent, but along with even more retro references such as Georges Méliès and “Creature From the Black Lagoon,” there are other reminders of the other cinematic legacies the decade gave us, such as “Look Who’s Talking.”

Lisa (Kathryn Newton) is the kind of teenage girl who would immerse herself in its more gothic offerings, and as she grows more sure of herself throughout the movie, her brand of lacey black clad, punky femininity are fashionable callbacks to Winona Ryder’s own time well spent as the heroine to weird girls in “Heathers” and Beetlejuice.” 

Lisa is the weird girl who doesn’t want to be, a budding artist who has found herself in the wrong story. Her life has essentially become a slasher since her mother was murdered trying to protect her from a deranged home invader and her father Dale (Joe Chrest) remarried a mere six months later to Janet (Carla Gugino), a stepmother whose dysfunction errs into cartoonishly evil territory. 

Focus Features

To cope, Lisa endeavors to remake her life into a Gothic romance through the sheer power of imagination. She loves to hang out alone in the lush greenery of the local graveyard, and she even has a favorite tombstone. It’s a lot for a brooding weirdo in the yuppie era, where teen girls were expected to get out and get socialized, often a euphemism for shut up and conform already.

But along with the genre’s blood-spattered killers, the 80’s also saw a number of at times tragically misunderstood, persecuted creatures interact with humans. So when the undead monster is magically raised from the grave, his existence isn’t merely the most obvious shout-out to Mary Shelley’s most famous creation who also just happens to be one of the greatest misunderstood monsters of all time, he’s also a bridge to multiple genres.

As The Creature, Cole Sprouse gets to put a bloody spin on his image as the tormented bad boy with a heart of gold. Thanks to a Tim Burtonesque animated intro before we even meet Lisa, he already has his own backstory full of artistic passion and heartbreak, and he quickly becomes a mute companion to Lisa while yearning for much more. 

As the two begin to pile up the bodies between them, partly out of revenge, partly for the spare parts The Creature uses to rebuild himself, he begins to look dangerous in an entirely different way as Sprouse goes from dank to his usual dreamy. It’s a more complex look at a teenage girl who is often unlikable and takes advantage of everyone around her, leaving a bloody path in her wake as even the undeserving are left shattered, including her sweet, well-meaning stepsister Taffy (Liza Soberano), the only person who has staunchly stood by and defended Lisa. At heart, this may be Lisa’s fairy tale, but she’s no long-suffering Cinderella or even Belle, even if her love does transform a beast into a handsome prince.

Multiple genres that can’t be reduced to simplistic messaging and an extremely flawed female protagonist who dares to be horny, enraged and generally unlikable? It means another type of history is playing out, that of critical panning and lackluster box office returns. The teenage girls at my screening were loving it though, and chances are that another familiar path will manifest given time: a cult favorite and a staple of plenty a sleepover. 

Directed By Women: Birth/Rebirth (2023)

IFC Films

“Birth/Rebirth” is what I like to call an odd little film. The kind you probably shouldn’t watch while you eat.

It benefits from multiple viewings, and a sense of trust that the medical professionals know what they’re doing. Because in writer/director Laura Moss’s dark meditation on motherhood and Frankenstein, they’re clearly interested in the science of it all. If you were actually skilled and twisted enough to successfully reanimate a human corpse, what exactly would it involve?

The short answer is in some ways what you would expect: a whole lot of gruesome. And it takes all types to make it happen. The duo who bring it about, and who eventually become a twisted, odd couple co-parenting unit, are the kind of polar opposites who are brought together by their mutual interest in the undead six-year-old girl who comes to (re)define their lives.

Celie Morales (Judy Reyes) is the warmly empathetic embodiment of motherhood. Her daughter, the soon to be deceased Lila (A.J. Lister), conceived, we later discover, via IVF, is the sort of adorable moppet who will respond to her mother’s distracted state by telling her a secret: “I’m not getting enough attention.”

It’s so effortlessly sweet that getting invested in mother and daughter is one of the easier demands “Birth/Rebirth” makes, and it’s especially crucial once things really get going and the movie reveals what Celie is willing to do in the name of motherly love. 

The other half of what is to come is naturally a very deliberate contrast. A pathologist at the same hospital where Celie works as a nurse, Rose Casper (Marin Ireland) is the source of much of the film’s dark humor and its spirit. She’s the one who’s been interested in reanimating corpses since second grade, with tales of cutting off starfish legs and similar, disastrous experiments on the class hamster.

As an adult, Rose is far more comfortable around the dead bodies she’s made her life’s work, coldly dismissive of colleagues and the guy she masturbates in the bathroom to get the necessary materials for her process. She’s so socially inept in fact that she doesn’t predict that someone is bound to come looking for Lila after she tragically passes and Rose makes off with her deceased body for her obsessive quest in treating death as if it were a scientific obstacle to surmount.

To be fair, she could hardly anticipate that Celie would know to go straight to the hospital basement and track down Rose at her coldly efficient apartment to claim her daughter’s body, only to discover exactly what Rose has been up to. Like the busy single mother she is, Celie doesn’t waste time condemning, going straight into mom and nurse mode, eventually moving in with Rose in order to aid her and track Lila’s progress.

The work that they do involves the aforementioned gruesomeness of motherhood that we tend to not want to acknowledge, from the routine checkups like amniocentesis, which involve a very long needle being inserted into a pregnant woman’s belly, and the everyday efforts that involve keeping Lila reanimated.

Much like old age, motherhood ain’t for sissies. In their efforts to keep it going, Rose and Celie begin to take on each other’s characteristics, with Celie isolating herself from her well-meaning friends and Rose becoming warmer to a degree that her startled coworker asks her if she’s okay when he sees her smiling. 

It’s hardly the expected route to take, with cinema’s long tradition of creepy kids in horror that shows no signs of slowing down, from “The Bad Seed” to “Pet Sematary” to “Sinister” to more recently, “Hereditary.” But “Birth/Rebirth” keeps it real, in a manner of speaking, with the revived Lila exhibiting more of the limited motor skills and speech patterns that would be expected from such a grisly turn of events.

It’s refreshing in a way to see a movie that never forgets that in the best of circumstances, birth (at least from what I can gather from my own childfree by choice status) is a “disgusting and beautiful process.” Not to mention a bold choice to make those responsible for bringing the unnatural state of affairs into the world as the potential monsters. After all, much like the “Frankenstein” story that serves as the inspiration for this dark and twisted tale, the so-called monster didn’t ask to be created, and is not the real source of the horror to follow.

It’s us. It’s always us.

Directed By Women: Kokomo City (2023)

By Andrea Thompson

Holiday breaks are wonderful for many reasons, but as I return for a new year after a self-imposed hiatus, one of the benefits I reaped is getting to view D. Smith’s remarkable documentary “Kokomo City” multiple times. In the constant hustle that is the life of a freelance writer, getting to really soak in and absorb a film has become something of a luxury in the age of content, AI, and ever present deadlines.

And there is so much to appreciate in “Kokomo City,” which follows the lives of four Black trans women, all of whom are or were engaged in sex work. Want to think, consider, and laugh out loud within the first five minutes? Then give this one a watch, because there’s a whole lot of ground to cover during the 73 minutes we spend getting to know these women.

This is the part where I tend to marvel at the fact that this is a filmmaker’s feature debut, but D. Smith had been working in the music world as a producer for years before she discovered a passion for filmmaking, an endeavor which was partly born out of necessity. Although she worked with household names in the early 2000s that included Lil Wayne and Ciara, among others, even winning a Grammy in 2009, she was “forced out of the music industry” (as Smith herself put it) once she came out as trans.

Finding herself broke, homeless, and somewhat adrift, “Kokomo City” isn’t just representative of a promising new direction, it’s something of a comeback, and the accolades have been pouring in. They damn well should be, since Smith makes good use of the access she was granted to each of these women’s lives, the kind it’s difficult to picture another filmmaker getting.

If Smith weren’t also Black and trans, would we have been privy to Smith’s own very individualistic take on the contemplative route, with the kind of intimate dialogue that includes everything from hair removal tips to discussion of class, race, and how such forces affect their ability to pay those bills while they’re lounging in bed or the bathtub?

Unlikely, since “Kokomo City” has, in many ways, an insider’s unblinking gaze of the world and topics it’s delving into. And although her previous career came to a painful end (for now at least), it seems to have been time well spent, with the doc’s gorgeous black and white aesthetic and stylistic flourishes giving it an edgy music video feel - the click of a gun, the sound of a roar as sexuality is discussed, and the killer use of music in general.

Those discussions about sexuality, complete with light reenactments and nudity, also come off as both naturalistic and raw, to use the most convenient cliche. But that rawness applies to other less flashy, but still arresting topics, namely the way all four women discuss their lives and how their identities affect not only their daily circumstances but those of their clients. These women are older - to use the more gentle euphemism about anything having to do with women in pop culture who’ve left their 20s behind - having successfully entered various phases of their 30s, and are thus savvy survivors; not only more aware of the bullshit but less likely to take it.

That bullshit manifests in film’s most constant thread: the vicious hypocrisy of the many ways men take advantage of and sometimes actively harm them, and how cis women are typically all too willing to let it happen, but are likewise unable to imagine their partners even being attracted to them. And all four of the film’s subjects, as well as the men who are willing to speak of that attraction, are willing to make some truly jaw-dropping statements about it.

Daniella Carter in KOKOMO CITY, courtesy ofMagnolia Pictures

As one member of the film’s central foursome Daniella Carter sums it up: “The only thing he there for is escaping his own goddamn reality. And you know what that reality is? Ten times better than the one he’s giving you.” With such statements - and plenty more where that came from - it would be easy to think that “Kokomo City” revels in self-seriousness, but like many a pop culture offering from those who are traditionally marginalized, humor and joy are the primary defense mechanisms when you generally don’t have access to more official protection.

What’s left unsaid may be even more telling. How did the men who are willing to talk about homophobia in the Black community and their own attraction and encounters with trans women come to meet Smith and the other women on-screen? As the women themselves speak of how often their typical customers conform to the stereotypical tough guy image, it’s indicative of a long history of gender and sexual fluidity in hip hop, a community that has only recently begun to grapple with its history of vicious homophobia.

It doesn’t prevent “Kokomo City” from earning every bit of the oft-used descriptor unflinching, and sadly that includes a frustratingly common ending for one of the most jaded of the women the documentary follows: Koko Da Doll, who was shot and killed in Atlanta, and to whom the film is dedicated. If another piece of art must end up being a tribute to a vibrant, resilient person whose life still ended far too soon, this one at least is also a beautiful, powerful testament to a community which finds itself under siege yet nevertheless refuses to define itself by its oppressors.

Directed By Women: Blue Jean (2022)

Magnolia Pictures

By Andrea Thompson

In the simplest of terms, as defined by Britannica, color is the aspect of any object that may be described in terms of hue, lightness, and saturation. But how do we define how it defines us? How do we describe a phenomenon which so casually evokes a range of reactions and emotions to those who, for whatever reason, have never encountered it? How do we define what defines us, especially when it’s so intertwined in our lives we practically forget it exists?

Apropos for a film that takes such a concept into its very title, “Blue Jean” is above all evocative - of feeling most of all. The Jean of the title (played with tenderly compassionate vulnerability by Rosy McEwen) is a woman who is living what can be simply defined as a closeted life. It’s a phrase tossed off so casually, often even humorously, that we can forget what it really encompasses to have to hide the most loving, and thus often best part of yourself, from others, sometimes in plain sight.

Blue isn’t merely the film’s aesthetic of choice which winds its way through Jean’s life as she attempts to reconcile her precarious balancing act, at times it literally cradles her in her arms. Her bathroom is wrapped in blue, and of course, much of her wardrobe is various shades of it, the various settings gorgeously rendered by cinematographer Victor Seguin incorporate it, and the student uniforms during gym at the secondary school where Jean teaches are also sky hued.

It’s easy to see how another film could take a lesbian gym teacher and embrace what has long become a kind of running joke. But Jean is working and living in Newcastle in 1988. It’s relatively small, conservative, and a world away (on the other side of the country really) from the more metropolitan London, when Margaret Thatcher’s government is about to pass a law criminalizing homesexuality. Nothing funny about it.

It is, in essence, easy to get the blues, living as Jean does in a time when her very existence is seen as an offense. No wonder her more out and proud girlfriend Viv (Kerrie Hayes) uses the phrase deer in the headlights to describe Jean at one point. So what then, can a life look like?

For Jean, it can actually look pretty good, as long as nothing changes. She is mostly uninterested in joining her coworkers for a pint with their talk of pairing her up with a guy, SlimFast diets, and their general agreement with the reports that extol thinking of the children whenever anyone rebels against the concept of gay people as a threat to society. She’d rather head out to the warm vibes of the lesbian bar she frequents, where she’s earned the nickname Baby Jean, and enjoy some good sex with Viv,  who is quick to push back against her girlfriend’s own internalized homophobia.

But no cerulean shield will be enough when Lois (Lucy Halliday), one of Jean’s students, becomes a frequent attendee at the local lesbian bar and of course, recognizes her teacher. Suddenly, the microaggressions become harder to take, from her supposedly supportive sister who still keeps Jean’s wedding picture on her mantle and all but clutches her pearls at the thought of her five-year-old son being introduced to Viv as Jean’s girlfriend, the neighbor across the way whose coldly hateful gaze has all the wrath of an auto-da-fé, to the dating shows where women are asked to be appropriately feminine enough for whatever random man is chosen as the catch of the night.

As Drew Burnett Gregory wrote in her Autostraddle review of the film, “‘Save the children’ is just about the easiest manipulation tactic those who want us dead can use.” It’s an apt summary of how concern is so often weaponized to the detriment of all, including nearly every life writer-director Georgia Oakley chronicles, however briefly, in “Blue Jean.” A queer woman herself who was born in 1988, Oakley so compassionately depicts her subject and the way she at times fails the very people who need her most it’s occasionally difficult to believe she didn’t live out the period and the havoc it left in its wake, which is threatening to repeat itself, and in some cases already is.  

The thing about the color Oakley chooses for her metaphor though? It tends to always be there, waiting for those to acknowledge its presence. It’s the color of the sea and sky, some of our most common trouser choices, and it can also be indicative of how warm it can be when we find a communal safe space that lends it support.