Queer Comfort Viewing: cozy coming of age movies
For reasons that should be obvious, quite a few of us are probably going to be reaching for more cozy comfort media over the next while as a way to help us cope and function. So, I figure I might as well make a note of a few of them as I go, in case others need something they can watch without triggering an anxiety attack.
And, because I have permanent brain damage from studying comparative literature, I can’t help but pick a theme for a comparative analysis of how a group of films tackle the same subject.
This time: queer coming of age romances.
Romance as a genre may sound simplistic to those who aren’t familiar with it. After all the premise is straightforward: two people fall in love over the course of the story and overcome obstacles that prevent them from being together.
The overcoming obstacles bit is a requirement, otherwise you’re just writing a book or making a movie that has romantic elements, not a romance. You know how just having a few jokes in a story doesn’t make it a comedy, the overall thrust and tone of the story has to be comedic for it to be a “comedy”? It’s like that.
Because romance as a genre is usually pretty agnostic about the kind of obstacles the would-be lovers are facing, romance tends to be a pretty versatile genre. One narrative tactic that romance writers have been using since the days of Jane Austen is for the obstacles to be internal. That is, the obstacle isn’t so much an unresolved murder mystery like in Georgette Heyer’s The Toll-Gate, but unresolved emotional issues or immaturity in the leads.
Jane Austen even tended to put the issues directly in the title: Pride and Prejudice.
This is also a tactic that lets you create conflict and drama without violence or abuse. Done well, it gives you the satisfying feeling of witnessing two characters coming together by becoming better people.
It’s unsurprising that one of the more common ways of creating this dynamic is simply by building the story about characters who are young and immature and who, over the course of the story, reach a level of maturity that lets them function in a relationship.
To put it more crudely, this means the characters usually start out as dumbasses and then figure out ways to not be a dumbass. Done badly, this can be frustrating – “these assholes do not deserve happiness!” – done well it can be sweet and life-affirming.
Even though we don’t have that many queer movies to choose from, there are a few that belong to or touch on this genre.
The Thing About Harry and Love, Simon #
The Thing About Harry is direct-to-Hulu movie, I think, though I don’t know what it’s availability today is. It’s certainly not available on Disney Plus outside the US, at least.
This one is very much in the “college-aged dumbasses learn to not be such dumbasses” mode of the genre, this time borrowing the approach that When Harry Met Sally used of covering a longer time period. Although, thankfully, the two leads here are not the same kind of genuinely awful and toxic people that Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal were playing.
It doesn’t break any new ground and definitely feels a bit like the pitch was “what about When Harry Met Sally, but with a queer cast on a TV budget.” It’s definitely worth watching once. One of its saving graces is that it feels realistic, despite the TV movie aesthetics. The characters are clearly a part of the queer community and the longer time period makes the maturation and growth feel more plausible. No sudden breakthroughs leading to instant character changes here.
Love, Simon was a 20th Century Fox movie, ostensibly with a higher budget than The Thing About Harry, and it did well enough for there to be a sequel TV series that’s a bit messier (and honestly therefore a little bit more fun).
It’s a little bit more inventive by virtue of being based on a well-regarded novel. Overall it’s sweet and inoffensive, but at the same time it feels marginally less grounded and more like a TV movie than The Thing About Harry because of its reliance on contrivances and grand romantic gestures.
This can be a good or bad thing, depending on what you want from a movie. Love, Simon is very much in the vein of Imagine Me & You in that they’re both clearly hellbent on demonstrating that queer romantic comedies can do all the same tropes and conventions as the straight ones.
Both Love, Simon and Imagine Me & You basically pull it off and are genuinely fun to watch, but that doesn’t take way the issue that some of these tropes are genuinely tired and revitalising them requires considerable inventiveness.
Crush, Fucking Åmål, and The Half of It #
Crush is another survivor of the streaming world’s short-lived dalliance with queer-friendly media. Should be available on Hulu or Disney Plus, depending on where you are. The cast does a great job even if the writing itself is unoriginal and uneven. Megan Mullally is amazing as always. It’s inoffensive and, even though it doesn’t leave much behind, makes for great comfort viewing. Dumb teens are dumb during their last year in high school, secrets make things complicated, but they learn how to be marginally less dumb and have fewer secrets leading to a happy ending. Classic stuff.
Fucking Åmål, often cowardly called Show Me Love, ostensibly has a pretty similar subject to Crush, albeit with that typical nordic social realism twist. I can tell you right now that this movie about teens growing up and feeling isolated in a shitty homophobic small Nordic town is one of the more relateable pieces of media I have ever watched. It’s a personal favourite and arguably a modern classic. It has a happy ending, which occasionally is more realistic than the other thing.
The last movie I’d like to mention is not a romance and, in fact, suffered because Netflix’s marketing constantly implied that it was: The Half of It.
It also had the misfortune of being released during the COVID-19 pandemic which meant it didn’t get the festival screenings that might have cemented its reputation. A modern take on Cyrano de Bergerac except with teens in a small religious American town and with the Cyrano-type role filled by a bilingual queer Asian-American teen who’s helping a jock woo the local deacon’s daughter.
The movie refuses to give us your typical romance ending because it correctly realises that this would cheapen the growth of these particular characters. Instead, it settles for leaving all the characters with a realistically attained maturity and strongly implying that the leads, Ellie and Aster, will come together in the future, once their place in the world is more settled.
It’s a genuinely affecting and funny movie that takes its time while still managing to treat all of its characters with a level of respect you often don’t see in coming of age movies.
Netflix may have forgotten this film exists, but it exists. It’s still there and I really think everybody should see it.