Five underrated lesbian movies you need to watch immediately - INTO
Out of the Celluloid Closet

 Five underrated lesbian movies you need to watch immediately

Lisa Laman

With the summer kicking off in earnest, it’s time to embrace the best kinds of movies around: lesbian cinema. Titles like Carol, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, The Handmaiden, and so many more never go out of style regardless of what time of the year it is. In a month dedicated to activism and subversions of the societal status quo, though, it’s more important than ever to cherish these films that upended countless cinematic norms. The best lesbian films didn’t just offer richly human portrayals of queer women existence. They also countered larger cinematic norms with unorthodox visual and narrative impulses.

Queer folks don’t adhere to capitalistic societies definitions of “normalcy.” Why should our films?

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While the lesbian cinema canon isn’t as vast as, say, the filmographies of directors Dasari Narayana Rao or Takashi Miike, there are now enough of these motion pictures to ensure that some qualify as underrated.  These are the productions that don’t always get referenced in mass media or have a significantly smaller Letterboxd footprint compared to their contemporaries. So why not give these excellent under-seen lesbian films a watch? They’re all daring works worthy of far more attention than they’ve received.

D.E.B.S.

Director Angela Robinson kicks off D.E.B.S. on a delightful foot with a bombastic voice-over narrator that explains the film’s lady super-spies by declaring, among other proclamations, “FOOLS CALL THEM INNOCENT”. So begins about the four members of the spy academy D.E.B.S. (Discipline, Energy, Beauty, Strength), including aspiring artist protagonist Amy (Sara Foster). One of their missions bring them face-to-face with the nefarious supervillain Lucy Diamond (Jordana Brewster), who just so happens to make a profound connection with Bradshaw.

It’s a classic “lovers to enemies” saga told with tremendous wit, earnestness, and cinematic influences ranging from Moonraker to David Zucker comedies. Robinson infuses D.E.B.S. with bursts of thoughtfulness (including how male objectification of queer women affection dehumanizes actual lesbian yearning), but it’s also all just such a blast to watch. Better than any James Bond or Austin Powers movie (I said what I said!), D.E.B.S. is relentlessly entertaining right from its opening voice-over narration.

Rafiki

 Lesbians on film often exist to titillate cis-het male viewers or perish to motivate the character arcs of cis-het protagonists. You know what lesbians don’t often get to experience on-screen? Pure sweetness. The gooey, heartwarming affection cis-het couples exchange all the time in mainstream cinema often eludes lesbian-centric filmmaking. Wanuri Kahiu’s Rafiki is a phenomenal remedy to that trend. The film’s romantic bond between Kenyan teenagers Kena (Samantha Mugatsia) and Ziki (Sheila Munyiva) is rife with moments that’ll make any viewer with a soul go “awwwwww.” 

Intimate unhurried sequences chronicling the pair just sitting and being vulnerable with one another in a car is enough to form a lump in one’s throat. Later, more vibrant displays of queer bonding between the duo involving vivid neon face-paint are equally engaging. Kahiu’s terrific visual sensibilities and precisely modulated performances from the entire cast just accentuate Rafiki’s many glorious joys.

Wild Nights with Emily

After my Wild Nights with Emily screening, I got to talking with a movie theater employee who was checking people’s tickets that day. He revealed to me that he kept hearing people leaving Emily screenings scoffing about the film’s “lack of realism” because “people weren’t gay back then”. We both agreed it was an innately idiocy sentiment, but it was especially weird to bring up given the material Emily covered. This was a feature all about how Emily Dickinson’s (Molly Shannon) legacy was skewed and tarnished (not to mention diminished in queerness). This is a movie about restoring nuances to yesteryear figures, not reinforcing queer erasure.

What didn’t work for those bizarre patrons cast a spell on me. Wild Nights with Emily is a hoot, particularly with the reliably excellent Shannon crushing it in the lead role. Plenty of performers have tackled Emily Dickinson on camera (Hailee Steinfeld inhabited her for multiple seasons on Apple TV+, and Cynthia Nixon played her in 2016’s A Quiet Passion), but none have the conviction or subtle comedy chops of Shannon’s incarnation. Writer/director Madeleine Olnek also infuses Wild Nights with Emily with lots of dryly zany comedic touches and unorthodox flourishes that ensure this is no stagnant biopic. It’s a film whose subversive spirit lives up to Dickinson’s artistic legacy. What repelled those arthouse theater moviegoers six years ago could make for perfect viewing for you and your pals.

The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls in Love

The pair of titular young lesbians in The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls in Love might as well be in a hit Hootie & The Blowfish song given how they “come from different worlds.” Randy Dean (Laurel Holloman) lives in ramshackle, economically challenged confines while Evie Roy Jr. (Nicole Ari Parker) exists in the lap of luxury. They couldn’t be more different, yet a spark goes off between the pair. So begins writer/director Maria Maggenti’s ode to young romance and finding profound connections in unexpected places.

Their dynamic makes for an endlessly delightful film, particularly with all the specifically realized performances littering the runtime. Maggenti’s script also deftly recognizes the challenges of coming out as queer in rural confines without letting that overwhelm or dominate the story. Two Girls in Love is a tender exercise above all else, and its thoughtful heart takes precedent above all else.  

Working Girls

Molly (Louise Smith) is gay. She even has a girlfriend and resides in New York City. Yet when she clocks in at her job at a local brothel, she conceals that part of herself. She even laughingly dismisses the idea of being queer to another sex worker clearly grossed out by the concept of lesbianism. Such are the demands of capitalism. Lizzie Borden’s unsung masterpiece Working Girls quietly reinforces the extremes the marginalized must silently endure to survive a societal system viewing humans as replaceable cogs.

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Borden’s intimate gaze (confined to just one day in Molly’s life in this brothel) absolutely refutes the normally exploitative lens afforded to sex worker lives. Working Girls is full of colorful personalities that don’t just reflect how sex workers can look like anyone…it’s also just tremendously entertaining to watch these disparate souls collide. Subtly ingenious camerawork and profoundly moving displays of women looking out for one another are just two of the many additional charms that the motion picture provides. unsensationally rendering Molly’s story just makes the proceedings more transfixing. She’s a fascinating, complex human being, a perfect person to anchor a grounded slice-of-life movie like Working Girls. Oh, and despite the restrictions of her job and American society, Molly’s also 110% gay, never forget that. 

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