It is undeniable that, more than a decade into the blu-ray era, queer cinema of the past is woefully under-represented on the “new” medium.
Through the DVD era of the late 1990s and up to about ten years ago, queer cinema blossomed on home video. The new, cheaper-produced, more easily accessible DVD allowed for more content for niche audiences. I remember having a handful of gay-themed films on VHS, but I would have been lucky here in the UK to have found more than two or three such films on the shelf in even the biggest of stores. DVD – and the era of the internet – changed that considerably. Through labels such as Water Bearer, TLA and Strand Releasing in the US and Peccadillo, Millivres and TLA in the UK, dozens upon dozens of queer films became easily accessible. True, some were good, some were bad, and some were downright ugly – but they were there, nonetheless.
But precious few of those titles have made it to a blu-ray upgrade. We are still waiting for blu rays of the films of Andre Techine and Gael Morel, for example. Also much of Ozon’s earlier work, too. There is no blu ray release of what many would view as gay classics such as Beautiful Thing, Get Real, Trick, Were the World Mine, etc. (NB. I confess I stick to gay-themed films in my comments here – there are others out there far more knowledgeable than me of films featuring lesbian, trans characters etc, and I would love to hear from you).
The sad thing is that this situation isn’t likely to change in the future. While Strand have released coming-out classic Edge of Seventeen on blu ray, it is the exception and not the rule. While some of the titles I have mentioned above can be streamed on various services and channels, streaming is not a way of owning a film, and movies can be removed quickly and without warning. As the DVD becomes used less and less, we are in a worrying position where some key, historically important films are simply going to be forgotten and not seen by future generations unless the current situation changes rapidly. While the BFI, Eureka, Kino etc occasionally release a queer film, it is not where we should be at this stage. And it’s worrying.
Thankfully, the situation is somewhat rosier for films made and released within the blu-ray era itself. While many were/are still only released on DVD, others have had a blu-ray release as well, although not enough. One of those lucky films (and lucky for us) is Closet Monster, one of the best coming out/coming-of-age movies made during the last decade. Strand released this on blu-ray, although there is no such release in Europe. This tells the story of a young man who witnessed a traumatic incident when a child, and then suffered the breaking up of his parents while trying to come to terms with that incident. Now, around a decade on, he also has to come to terms with his sexuality – a sexuality inextricably connected with the incident he witnessed years earlier.
The film manages to thoroughly explore the themes of coming-of-age, coming out, and PTSD so well partly because it concentrates on a surprisingly small amount of characters. Oscar Madly (what a suitable name for a character in a film watched this week!) is at high school, but we don’t really get any view of his high school experience, thus removing peripheral characters that would otherwise take up precious moments within a ninety minute movie. The most important member of the supporting cast is Oscar’s pet hamster, which Oscar converses with a great deal as a way of trying to process the difficulties that he is going through. This relationship between teen and hamster could have turned into sentimental mush, but it’s never allowed to, and the final line from the hamster at the end of the film is just utterly perfect in this regard. Just as the viewer is blinking away those tears, they are snapped out of it in a wonderful way.
Connor Jessup, as Oscar, is stunning here. If ever an actor and character were made for each other, it’s here. Jessup (now most famous for Locke & Key) is a natural screen presence at any time, but this probably still ranks as his best performance to date. Isabella Rossellini provides the voice for the hamster and, again, this is brilliantly judged. Cute and charming, but more when the script calls for something else. Writer/director Stephen Dunn has managed to create a film that has fantasy elements but which also remains rooted in a hard-hitting reality even during those sequences. It is such a shame that, despite numerous awards for the film at festivals (including Best Canadian Feature Film at the Toronto festival), Dunn hasn’t followed this up with another feature-length movie. Perhaps Covid simply got in the way of that happening, but I’m guessing the reasons are probably more to do with the difficulties and (lack of) funding of indie filmmaking.
Closet Monster very much deserves its place on the still-slim roster of gay-themed films that have made it to blu-ray (and certainly deserves a space on your blu-ray shelves) but many others deserve a place, too – and one feels that, if those titles from the 1990s and 2000s don’t make it in the next couple of years, then they will be forgotten for the coming generations, and to deprive queer teenagers of seeing some of the best coming out movies ever made would be a tragedy – but rest assured that Closet Monster is every bit as good as the movies that it follows.
Beyond Boundaries 