Queer Classics: 3 Films To Revisit This Pride Month

In an interview with France Culture, I recall hearing actor and director Xavier Dolan talk about searching for himself in others’ films before going on to make his own. Though we may not all be filmmakers, aren’t we all seeking the answer to the same magmatic question - who am I?

Even if we can never fully respond, connecting to the intimate lives of others helps us approach our own. Through these three portrayals of raw, unabashed love and vulnerability, the characters show us how experiences of romantic love, in its most intense form, disorient and reroute us towards who we are and who we wish to become.

La Vie d’Adèle

Loosely based on the French graphic novel Le bleu est une couleur chaude, Abdellatif Kechiche’s stunningly shot La Vie d’Adèle (2013) is about a romantic encounter between two women, Adèle and Emma, as much as it’s about growing up and self-realization.

Unlike the novel’s more fragile and contemplative heroine, the movie’s lead Adèle is courageous and uninhibited. From the moment she sees blue-haired Emma in the streets of Lille, she’s at once drawn to and troubled by her. As their paths continue to cross, Adèle slowly steps outside herself and opens up entirely to Emma’s otherness and all that her artistic, intellectual milieu brings forth. She turns away from her narrow-minded high school friends and towards what she desires most - becoming an elementary school teacher and a relationship with Emma.

In close-up sex scenes that feel refreshingly honest and emotional, the camera invites the viewer to take part in the two bodies intertwining. Contentious as they might be to certain critics, Kechiche references in an interview with French film critic Michel Ciment that his intention is not about voyeurism. It’s about experiencing the love manifesting between two people. It’s also about growing with them as their lives take different directions.

Matthias & Maxime

Shot with his real-life group of friends in Montreal, Matthias & Maxime (2019) is Xavier Dolan’s eighth feature film. When childhood friends Matthias and Maxime are asked to kiss for a short film directed by Matt’s younger filmmaker sister, it reawakens long-repressed emotions that make up much of the film’s evolving plot.

In a naturalistic setting that exposes the characters’ daily life struggles and aspirations - Maxime’s dependent, alcoholic mother and his pending plans to move to Australia at the end of summer - the film delves into the psychological complexity commanding the two characters' contrasting sentiments. Maxime has nothing to lose and is curious about his feelings. Matt on the other hand knows his feelings exist and that they could threaten to destroy everything he’s built so far: a successful career at a conservative law firm and a relationship with his longtime girlfriend.

The story speaks to two different generational identities. One open to exploring sexuality and gender and another, torn between desire and shame. Often society puts pressure on us to label ourselves, to check the box - to identify ourselves as something static, something involving. But isn’t the journey of life more about the infinite possibilities of being? If there’s one definition of identity I agree with, it’s Paul Ricoeur’s understanding that the individual is - at once - the same and in constant evolution.

Call Me By Your Name

Luca Guadagnino’s film adaptation (2017) of Call Me By Your Name captures the unspoken tension and attraction transpiring between Elio and Oliver in sultry summer imagery that is - even more - moving to the senses than André Aciman’s exquisite text.

Set in northern Italy in the 1980s, the film immerses the viewer in an aura of literary prowess, classical music and human connection juxtaposed with sun, cicadas, peaches, bike rides through the countryside, dips in the pool and ineffable love.

Guadagnino’s evocative portrayal of the complicity of two souls is so palpable you can’t help but identify with the apprehension of the two characters as they dance around their feelings for one another throughout much of the picture and finally; come to recognize themselves in each other. Elio is Oliver and Oliver is Elio. Elio himself captures this sameness in Aciman’s novel in his borrowing of Emily Brontë’s words from Wuthering Heights, “he’s more myself than I am."

Their story recalls memories of that one encounter that forever altered your being to the point of metamorphosis, the mourning of its ensuing absence and the lingering hope of reconciliation.

Each film represents to varying degrees the conflict between collective convention and individual truth. These films uncover that labels are just that. They uncover that the superficial has little to do with self-discovery, that following one's inner compass in experiences of passionate love needs neither justification nor simplification.