i didn't want to watch this when i was younger because i thought it was going to turn me into a lesbian and now i'm watching it because I AM a lesbian! i love this character development with that being said, i fucking hated it. my main problem was the unnecessary sex scenes. i mean, they do nothing for the plot. that's when you know it was directed by a straight man for straight men. abdellatif was recently accused of sexual assault, by the way. the guy who made lea seydoux feel like a prostitute??? the man who made both lea and adele humiliated??? who would've thought! this is not the representation we deserve.
this is exactly the kind of movie "feminist men" would watch as an excuse to see two girls having sex without being porn, and call it arti hate how they portray lesbians and i feel like i've wasted three hours of my life that i can never recoveralso, can you PLEASE eat with your mouth shut???
The heavy criticisms of this film against its straight male gaze are clearly justified. While there are surely women who enjoy those scenes as well, the context certainly reveals that these scenes were made with the prurient desires of cishet men in mind. The improbability of some of the scenes shows who this is for. And that detracts heavily from the film, but the truth is, it's more than just the sex scenes. This is the lesbian Call Me By Your Name.An underage girl--that the film makes sure we know is underage--begins a relationship with an older woman, and in the end, she's crushed by it. It's melancholy and supposedly sweet and about maturation and love and... blah. Knowing a cishet male director made this film, abused the women in the lead roles to do it, and thinks a relationship between a minor and an adult are essential to telling this story (it would work just as well if Adele were an adult from the start), combined with the obvious male gaze here, makes it seem like another pedophilic fantasy. "But what if it happened this way? Wouldn't it be beautiful and not predatory?" "Adele chose this!" Blah blah blah.We don't need to see queer stories where adults and children get together. Stop it. Stop doing this to us, and stop using it to win awards and prestige. The other thing that bothered me so much about this trash is that it perpetuates the myth that the working class is more homophobic than the supposedly open-minded "middle" class. It ties their open-mindedness to their class in an obvious way and does nothing to explore the wider implications of it. I live and work with working class people every day of my life, and they are no more homophobic than people with slightly more means (ignoring the fact that the distinction between working class and "middle" class is meaningless and liberal nonsense). But more importantly, the homophobia present among the working class is not there because of something inherent to our class, but to class struggle. The (mostly white, straight, male) ruling class is the one making the laws, controlling the media, and spreading these lies. It's the ruling class who have systematized homophobia. Not the working class. Those values and thoughts spread through the working class because it divides us, and that benefits the ruling class.Homophobia is not unique to or inherent to the working class, and any sort of "middle" class (read: working class people with slightly more resources or lower end petty bourgeois people) is not inherently more open. The film doesn't quite state this, but it doesn't explore these distinctions well enough, making it feel instead superficial--and stereotypical--and thus, damaging and offensive. And for fuck's sakes, it's 2018, let the lesbians be fucking happy at the end already.Pride count: 7/30
