Certificate: 15 (strong language, sex, sex references, homophobia). Running Time: 97 mins. UK Distributor: Altitude Films
WHO’S IN IT?
Rosy McEwen, Kerrie Hayes, Lucy Halliday, Lydia Page, Stacy Abalogun, Amy Booth-Steel, Aoife Kennan, Farrah Cave, Lainey Shaw, Izzy Neish, Becky Lindsay, Ellen Gowland, Gavin Kitchen, Maya Torres, Deka Walmsley, Edmund Wiseman, Kylie Ann Ford, Emily Fairweather, Elizabeth Shaw, Kate Soulsby, Isla Bowles, Oliver Maratty Quinn
WHO’S BEHIND THE CAMERA?
Georgia Oakley (director, writer), Hélène Sifre (producer), Chris Roe (composer), Victor Seguin (cinematographer), Izabella Curry (editor)
WHAT’S IT ABOUT?
A schoolteacher (McEwen) struggles to hide their homosexuality at work…
WHAT ARE MY THOUGHTS ON BLUE JEAN?
As though the world needed yet another reason to hate the Tories, along comes Blue Jean to shed light on a pretty shameful piece of government legislation that was introduced during Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s time in office. Section 28, which came into effect in 1988 and was thankfully repealed by 2003, banned the promotion of homosexuality in schools, and caused many gay people – especially those who happened to work in education – to shield their true selves from the world if they were to have any chance of keeping their jobs and livelihoods. What may have seemed at the time like a win for hardcore conservatives and anti-gay organisations was, in fact, a devastating loss for the wider LGBTQ+ community in the long-term, as their voices were effectively silenced by law and could not nurture an entire generation of young people questioning their sexuality.
Writer-director Georgia Oakley’s debut feature tells just one of these many stories, with a resounding anger for the discrimination that was allowed to thrive under Section 28’s regime, and a real sense of heartbreak for those unfortunate enough to be caught dead in the middle of it all. It is a fierce debut by the filmmaker, and despite its occasional heavy-handedness it has a strong head and heart to itself.
Taking place in 1988 Newcastle, just as the effects of Section 28 are starting to be felt across the country, we follow a young woman named Jean (Rosy McEwen) who, during the day, works at the local school as a PE teacher, but at night heads out with her girlfriend Viv (Kerrie Hayes) to a lesbian bar with their like-minded friends. Jean is someone who keeps their personal life strictly separate from everything else, including work and family, as a means to stay hidden in plain sight within an increasingly judgemental society – so, as you can imagine, she begins to panic when one of her students, a shy new girl named Lois (Lucy Halliday), spots her at the lesbian bar one night. With her career and reputation on the line, Jean desperately tries to save face however she can, but soon finds herself on the wrong side of morality as her actions result in hurtful consequences.
Even twenty years after the repealing of Section 28, intolerance towards those identifying as gay, trans, non-binary and beyond is no calmer than it was when the legislative first came into effect, and Blue Jean is clearly coming after it with all of today’s related headlines squarely in its mind. Oakley’s film is certainly political, but it largely avoids becoming a hour-and-a-half grandstanding session by instead highlighting the difficult fight-or-flight mentality that many gay people such as Rosy McEwen’s Jean had to adopt in order to survive, often with morally questionable results. Throughout the film, Jean goes along with cruel lies just to save her own skin, including saying that her girlfriend Liv is merely an acquaintance when her young nephew unexpectedly comes over, but all it does is make her life exceedingly more difficult because she is unconsciously refusing to be proud of who she is, regardless of Section 28 being a thing. Oakley’s script presents her as a deeply flawed character, but also a tragic one because her closed-off nature in both her public and private lives stems directly from a lifetime of suppression and discrimination, causing her to be exactly those things in return. Jean is a product of the system, in all the most upsetting ways imaginable.
Oakley balances out her tricky subject matter with stylish direction, which leans hard into the Eighties aesthetic with its pop-heavy soundtrack and grainy film-stock cinematography, and getting a truly fantastic lead performance out of Rosy McEwen. The actor brings incredible believability to someone who, if interpreted the wrong way, could easily come off as a robotic and all-too ambiguous figure, but McEwen always invites the viewer to study her character’s deeper complexity through a series of well-chosen expressions that hint at something much deeper than someone who’s simply closed off from the world. She also shares plenty of emotional scenes with an equally excellent Kerrie Hayes, as someone who’s far prouder of her identity than her girlfriend is, but in the few moments we get to see her more vulnerable side offers greater sensitivity than she at first lets on. It is largely McEwen’s show, though, and the actor knocks it out of the park in ways that make you think that you’re watching someone who’s about to break into the bigger leagues of stardom.
The film is effective, stylish, and very well-acted, but there are parts where you feel as though it is a bit too concerned with hammering in its blatant messages. Oakley will occasionally pad her movie out with abstract sequences designed to hone in on a specific issue, as well as incorporating the odd symbolic shot of horses galloping freely in a nearby field, just in case you weren’t already aware of what kind of points it’s trying to get across. Moments like these are more often than not heavy-handed, but they are also far and few in between, with most of the remaining focus primarily on depicting the psychological turmoil of living under Section 28, and the discriminatory society that it enabled. When it’s purely circling around that, Blue Jean is a much more profound film, one that says all it needs to say without going too far over the line.
Although not perfect, it does a rather good job of putting the viewer into this difficult position and making it feel eerily plausible how even the oppressed are compelled to be cruel out of pure necessity. In that regard, it might be a difficult watch, particularly for anyone who may have experienced similar things during Section 28’s reign, but it is mostly a compelling and thoughtful drama that you’ll want to keep on the mind long afterwards.
SO, TO SUM UP…
Blue Jean is a thoughtful and often disheartening depiction of life under the oppressive Section 28 legislative, which writer-director Georgia Oakley reconstructs with a political edge – sometimes to where it can feel heavy-handed – but also an intriguing restraint in lionising its central queer characters who operate in morally grey areas, personified through a fantastic lead performance by Rosy McEwen.
