Earlier this week I attended a screening of Blue Jean at the Rio after being given a ticket by DIVA Magazine in their online giveaway. Since my first time at the cinema last year to watch Betsey Brown’s cowardly film Actors, I have finessed my way to events there without having to pay. The one notable exception being the Club Des Femmes (awesome people) screening of Mädchen in Uniform.
I had been mildly interested in Blue Jean since the London Film Festival last year. It’s a debut feature by a female filmmaker, and it’s a lesbian film about Section 28, the homophobic clause in UK law that prohibited “the promotion of homosexuality” in schools and local authorities from 1988 to 2003 (with a lingering afterlife). This was most keenly felt in schools, where several generations of queer youth (including my own) were made to feel utterly alone. This film should be my kind of shit given that it’s about history, and a history that directly impacted my development. Yet due to reasons that are boring, I was unable to take time off work for that festival, my time was therefore limited, and I ended up missing Blue Jean. As more and more British film critics were praising the film to high heavens with dead-on-arrival prose, my interest subsequently waned. That is until I saw Sarah Cleary despising it on Twitter. Then I saw Esmé Holden give the film a solitary star on Letterboxd and I was like “okay, two people whose opinions I actually respect are dissenting. Let me grab my headset, I’m re-joining the lobby.”
A crease in the uniformity of film discourse is often a sign of something interesting going on in the text, some nuggety kidney stone bouncing around the urethra. To my dismay, this was not the case with Blue Jean. I agree with Cleary and Holden that the film is bad, but it is bad in that banal way which makes it difficult to write about.
The film is essentially a character piece on Jean (Rosy McEwen), a PE teacher in the Northeast of England during the Thatcher years. Early in the film she delivers a speech to her students about fight-or-flight responses, and how they’re instinctual. Even at this point we already know Jean’s own response. She’s an uptight closet clinger in the sense that she hangs with the dykes in the club, but remains tight-lipped about her sexuality in her work and family life. When Section 28 is mentioned on the radio, she instinctively changes the station, while her butch girlfriend Viv (Kerrie Hayes) becomes her “friend” when family come a-knocking.
The arrival of new student Lois (Lucy Halliday) exposes how unworkable this delicate status quo truly is. Lois, a fifteen-year-old social outcast at school, is only able to find community at the club Jean frequents, where the young girl quickly spots her teacher. After seeing the film, I’ve been bothered by plot summaries that implicitly frame Lois, a gay child, as a threatening force. This is something that comes down to the script’s prioritisation of Jean’s interiority as the main character. Lois, even though she is the one who will grow up to be most affected by Section 28, is a more thinly sketched out character. We don’t really get to understand her home life, and her significance is only defined by how it relates to Jean’s narrative. This is a shame since I think Halliday is able to convey an awkwardness that hints at so much more. It’s just that we never really get to understand that “more.”
From the point that Lois spots Jean in the club toilets, the relationship between student and teacher is a thorny and politically fraught one. If Lois were to out Jean, then her teaching career would be over. That fear of outing also stays Jean’s hand when Lois is subjected to the homophobic jibes of her classmates, in particular from a girl named Siobhan (Lydia Page). What results is a simmering resentment between these two lesbians. Things eventually come to a head when Siobhan entices Lois into a kiss, then accuses her of sexual assault when Jean walks in on them. That fight -or-flight speech Jean gives at the beginning of the film rears its head again when Jean fails to back Lois as she is cornered by the homophobic education system, and ultimately suspended.
When Jean throws Lois under the bus, it is a dereliction of duty as both a teacher and as a lesbian. In this moment, Jean reminds me of a certain British trans film critic who hurt me deeply last year by prioritising her friendship with a media transphobe. The most resonant scene of the film for me is the one that takes place in the headmaster’s office. Both Siobhan and Lois sit before the authority of the school, including a mute Jean. Lois, frustrated by the injustice, furiously points out that nobody in the room is bothering to ask for her account of what happened before singling Jean out: “you’re the worst of the lot and you know it.” This was the only moment in Blue Jean that prompted an unqualified emotional response in me. I felt for Lois. The school institution’s refusal to even consider her perspective is, to me, the most acute demonstration of homophobic discrimination in the film.
Jean’s now-complete assimilation into the heterosexual institution is later visualised by a shot of her sitting in a straight pub with her colleagues, getting chatted up by one of the men. This, among other moments, got a laugh from the audience at the Rio. I don’t begrudge them that laughter, but it highlights a fundamental flaw with Blue Jean’s tone. The slow zoom out from Jean’s sullen face, plus the appropriately dour score by Chris Roe, indicate that this is a sombre moment of one of Jean’s many lows. Yet the emotional base tone of the scene is undermined by the humour, and this happens more than once in the film. Other serious moments are hampered by blunt filmmaking, such as Jean’s nightmare sequence, presented in a ghastly blue hue, depicting a slow-motion Lois fending off her classmates. Another groan-worthy titbit involves Jean hiding from Lois in the club toilet and spotting graffiti that says “resist the shame regime” because her internalised homophobia apparently wasn’t signalled enough by McEwen’s admittedly poised performance thus far. Let’s not even get into the clumsy insertion of Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness.
All this adds up to a film that is stodgy to watch. McEwen looks cool as fuck putting a cigarette into her mouth, something which happens multiple times throughout Blue Jean, acting like a minty refreshment for this increasingly weary critic. However, such a gesture cannot mask the slapdash foundations on which this film is built. During the post-screening panel, producer Hélène Sifre said that she and writer-director Georgia Oakley wanted the film to reach both the queer community and a straight audience in order to inform them about Section 28’s legacy. Just as Jean’s attempts to live a double life prove to be unsustainable, this approach hampers the film’s pedagogical and artistic aspirations. I think courting both a queer and straight audience is possible, especially with films that look to be crowd-pleasers with an ensemble cast such as Pride, a film that was explicitly about gay-straight solidarity. However, a po-faced serious character study with pretensions towards arthouse sophistication like Blue Jean has a much more difficult time meaningfully satisfying the needs of two distinct audiences. Watching the film’s portrayal of lesbian culture, that heady mixture of affection, identification, and hunger I normally associate with the best of queer cinema was absent. Cleary put it best in her recent review for Little White Lies when she wrote that the film’s “depiction of contemporaneous gay life feels equally unimaginative … reducing its boundless invention to gelled lighting and a perfunctory ‘Blue Monday’ needle-drop.”
For a film that seemed to me so obviously lacking, I was dismayed by the near-unanimous praise Blue Jean has received since its premiere at Venice, particularly from British critics. The Telegraph’s Tim Robey was itching to call the film “a slam-dunk masterpiece.” Tom Bond comes across as breathless in his effusive review for One Room With a View, trumpeting Oakley as a “major talent.” British critics overhyping British films seems to be a trend that carries with it a desperate need to prove our country still has chops when it comes to filmmaking. Couple that with the nicecore impulse in criticism that so conveniently aligns with the aims of marketing departments, and we end up with posters overcrowded with vapid pull quotes, and something dreadful like Censor is widely hailed as a triumph. I think I’m used to it at this point.
What does genuinely irk me with the reception to Blue Jean is the insistence of cis writers trying to link the film’s themes to present-day transphobia in British public life. Clarisse Loughrey is a critic who I appreciate and consider to be a decent person based on our online interactions. She ends her review of Blue Jean by saying it is “piercing and prescient” that the homophobic anxieties depicted in Blue Jean such as fretting about lesbians in changing-rooms, is identical to present-day prejudices about trans people. Next month it will have been ten years since British school teacher Lucy Meadows took her own life after she was bombarded by transphobic media coverage, including a particularly vile piece from Richard Littlejohn. I was thinking of Meadows when I sat down for Blue Jean, though to be honest, I didn’t see any substantive similarity between the film and this real-life case of murder-by-media. It’s impossible for me to see Blue Jean as a precursor to modern-day transphobia because it’s all the same shit and the stink has never wafted away.
Then you have Hannah Strong reviewing the film at Venice for Little White Lies, where she closes her review thus: “Considering the stranglehold transphobia has on British culture currently, Blue Jean feels all the more impactful as a cautionary tale of how this intolerance only breeds hatred and hurt.” An observation that is both superficial and insultingly obvious. Intolerance breeds hatred? Who would have guessed?! I understand that the conditions of reviewing during a film festival breed undercooked criticism, so I can let this slide.
What I found beyond the pale was Jack King’s review for The Playlist in which he includes this sentence: “That Blue Jean still feels such a timely statement, with trans people hounded daily by elements of the media class and anti-queer hate crime statistics suggestive of frightening regression, is damning in itself.” Which elements would that be Jack? I am totally against this framing of British media transphobia as being contained to “elements of the media class.” British media is fundamentally transphobic. It is baked into institutions from the BBC to Murdoch’s empire, from the Guardian Media Group, to the Telegraph Media Group. What this means is that everybody in this media class (and that includes film critics) is complicit in that prejudice even if they are trans, and even someone like me who has stayed on the periphery of that life. It pisses me off because Jack King is on friendly terms with the Telegraph’s chief film critic Robbie Collin.
Robbie Collin is a transphobe. I tweeted about the large number of transphobic accounts he was following in May last year. In 2021, he used the term “trans rights activism orthodoxy” a dogwhistle if ever I heard one. The Telegraph has an editorial line which can best be described as “war on woke” and of course trans people are a juicy enemy for such a venture. Collin is very much enmeshed in that institution and its bigotries. Jack will know all this. We were in a group chat where I was complaining about Collin’s transphobia in 2021. I left that group chat because I didn’t feel safe around Jack after I saw him interacting with Collin on Twitter. Every day I live with the knowledge of how trans people suffer in this country and abroad. Anti-trans bills are being passed in the US, the scare-mongering never stops over here, and I often learn about another trans woman who either dies by her own hand or the hand of another. I see the media as playing a vital role in producing such a climate where this shit happens, and it is difficult to stomach being around people like Collin who are part of that machine and get to live cushy lives off it, while there are girls I know who are struggling right this second.
What does this have to do with Blue Jean? Let’s go back to the scene in the headmaster’s office. It’s the point in the film that most clearly illustrates the connection between institution and individual as it relates to homophobia. Jean’s moral failing is difficult to overstate even if we can sympathise with the circumstances that led her to make it. The institution of the school, indeed hegemonic heterosexuality itself, comes down on a teenage girl, a child, and Jean’s self-interest has her side with a force that works against her too. British film criticism is part of the British media, and the British media is institutionally transphobic. We are culpable in that transphobia when we don’t challenge it, when we stay on friendly terms with people who hold transphobic views in order to further our own careers. It annoys me that film critics can draw a connection between the action in Blue Jean and the transphobia today, yet are unable to interrogate their own culpability with the latter.
The film ends with a resolution that feels somewhat unearned. Jean overcomes her internalised homophobia and is able to live openly despite at least another 15 years of Section 28 ahead of her. I didn’t understand how Lois could forgive Jean for possibly derailing her entire education. The scene in the headmaster’s office brought up feelings of hurt for me, but I can’t ignore how underwhelming the rest of the film was. It’s bad in a way that’s not interesting to write about. What intrigues me about Blue Jean is the disconnect between my response (as well as those of Holden and Cleary) and the British consensus. Perhaps then Blue Jean can be something more than a disappointing film I saw one evening in Dalston and be a way to explore the relationship between film, criticism, the wider world and my own feelings as an individual.