Blue Jean (Georgia Oakley, 2022) (Patreon)

Debut films are hard, and it's often easy to overlook some formal or narrative missteps. Everyone has to start somewhere, and besides, the sheer gumption it takes to get your work in the can and on the screen can demand a level of confidence that can partially occlude an awareness of the weak spots. There are two big problems with Blue Jean, however. One, it is a film that speaks so directly to our current political moment that there isn't a lot of room for error. That's hardly Oakley's fault. But the other problem most certainly is. Blue Jean doesn't seem to know what kind of film it is, and this results in significant potential being squandered.

This is a portrait of Jean Newman (Rosy McEwan), a high school gym coach in Tyneside during the Thatcher 80s. She is a closeted lesbian, and she has reason to think that her job might be in jeopardy were she to come out. During the action of the film, we hear news clips of the parliament debating a bill called Section 28, a Tory initiative to prohibit "promotion" (i.e., acknowledgment or discussion) of homosexuality in British state schools. The implications are clear. Thatcher wants to remove LGBTQ+ people from public life, particularly in education, where simply being an authority figure could be construed as "promotion."

Needless to say, Oakley's film arrives at a moment when global crypto-fascism is on the rise, and the American Right has found a soft target in queer people. Florida's "Don't Say Gay" bill, along with the dozens of anti-trans initiatives in state houses across the country, make Blue Jean regrettably au courant. After all, these creeps see the Reagan / Thatcher years as a golden age, one they hope to recreate, this time in the form of a thousand-year reich. Blue Jean displays the human toll taken by such legislative bullying. For most conservative voters, "gay people" are just a scary abstraction, but these laws can and will destroy lives.

The trouble with Blue Jean, though, is that it keeps threatening to be a much more complicated film that it is actually cut out to be. The overriding sense is that Oakley has produced a kind of afterschool special pleading for tolerance, and just so happens to have done this with a young, straight-passing femme character who (unlike her dyke-punk friends) looks "just like everyone else." This passing privilege is at the heart of Blue Jean, but it is never actually acknowledged. In fact, Oakley seems to suggest that Jean's ability to fit in with the normies produces a special kind of anguish for her. 

Addressing this issue might have allowed Oakley to make Jean an outright coward, someone who will sacrifice the lives of others to remain safe in the closet. After all, Jean's school life becomes tricky when a new student, 15-year-old Lois (Lucy Halliday) turns up at the local gay bar, where she and Jean spot each other. When Lois is targeted by another student (Lydia Page) as a predatory lesbian, Jean refuses to stand up for the kid. When Jean's girlfriend Viv (Kerrie Hayes) chastises her, telling Jean that she owes Lois (and the next generation generally) an example, to "show that we can live," Jean coldly responds that such an example would be a lie. In other words, Jean sees queer desire as a kind of death sentence.

This subtext of Jean being a deeply damaged individual, constructing a closet for herself far smaller than the Tories could ever truly manage, is never adequately explored. Blue Jean should be a study of the psychosis of the closet, the way that social pressure can make someone their own worst oppressor. Oakley constantly surrounds Jean with homophobic comments by co-workers, audio from MPs spouting bigoted nonsense, and above all, a huge billboard for the Conservatives on the side of a counsel flat, trumpeting traditional morality. Blue Jean treats this as realism, when in fact it plays like the paranoid echoes in Jean's own mind, her self-hatred reflected back by the world. But Blue Jean has a job to do -- progressive social commentary -- and I guess this doesn't leave much room for an antiheroine. In the end, Jean is redeemed, and returns to work as if nothing had ever happened.