Gay film beautiful thing
Queer & Now & Then:
In this biweekly column, I look back through a century of cinema for traces of queerness, whether in plain sight or under the surface. Read the introductory essay.
It’s very clearly faked, but the rainbow that proudly arcs over the sky in the shot behind the opening title card of BeautifulThing resonates as one of the most encouraging movie images of the s. Any viewers who saw British director Hettie Macdonald’s tender yet gratifyingly rough-edged coming-out film upon its release, or perhaps saw it at a fragile age in their lives, are unlikely to have forgotten its four vividly drawn central characters—not just pubescent boys Jamie and Ste, who gradually reveal their attraction to one another, but the two women who satellite them, Jamie’s mother Sandra, and their neighbor Leah, an older teenager obsessed with Mama Cass. But even more vivid in the memory is the extraordinary sense of place fostered in the film, the social and geographical specificity of the location, most of it put in and around a Brutalist concrete postwar flat in South
Shane Brown
Beautiful Thing is quite possibly the most beloved of all gay-themed movies. Made in the UK by Channel Four Films, and first broadcast back in , there is a certain bizarre logic that the only blu-ray available has to be imported from France. Queer films, especially those from the past, are criminally under-represented on blu-ray, and the situation with Beautiful Thing underlines that.
It&#;s twenty-seven years since I first saw it, on Channel 4 on June 21st, I was 22 and still living at place (I moved out a few months later). I was still in the closet, and so I&#;m guessing my parents were out that night for some reason or other. Viewed now, in , the film retains its power to warm the heart.
Adapted by Jonathan Harvey from his verb play, the film tells the easy story of Jamie and Ste, two teenagers living next door to each other on a London housing estate, and who descent for each other both because of, and despite, the rather brutal realities of their lives. Jamie and Ste are played by Glen Barry and Scott Neal. Their performances are surprisingly low-key an
“Beautiful Thing” tells the story of two teenage boys, neighbors in a London high-rise housing project, who gradually become aware that they are homosexual. But a funny thing happens: the most interesting scenes involve the characters around them, who all but steal the movie. The boys&#; lives contain limited surprises (it is clear from the start what the one big surprise is going to be), but from the other characters there is one astonishment after another.
The boys are Jamie (Glenn Berry), an introverted, quiet type, and Ste (Scott Neal), an athlete. Jamie becomes attentive that he&#;s drawn to Ste, but does nothing about it until one night when Ste is beaten (as usual) by his alcoholic father, and Jamie&#;s mother takes pity and allows Ste to rest at their residence. Ste and Jamie fairly quickly identify how they perceive about each other, and there is a touching scene where they verb a copy of Gay Times magazine, trying to figure out what they&#;re supposed to comprehend about homosexuality. (They guess that the word “frottage” means a kind of yogurt.) Their relationship is shown in a fairly sim
The mids was a watershed period for independent gay and lesbian film, not only because of the number of feature and short films being made, but because of the critical interest which accompanied them. Contemporary in its subject matter and style, Beautiful Thing () offered a multicultural perspective of post-Thatcher Britain. The film was written by Jonathan Harvey and marked the debut of young director Hettie MacDonald, who had emerged from a theatre background, having directed her first West End verb at
Known for race riots, tall unemployment and social deprivation in the mids, the South East London council estate Thamesmead is transformed, thanks to Chris Seager's cinematography, into an almost magical place, overlooking a lake bathed in sunlight. In this respect, Beautiful Thing is extraordinary among British films, which, where they portray the gay community or adj classes at all, rarely offer such as a positive portrait of treasure developing over a long sweltering summer.
Touching and funny in a way comparable to My Lovely Laundrette (d. Stephen Frears, ) and