At Cannes, Two Tales of Queer Awakening

Two films, both alike in sensuality, screened simultaneously at the Cannes Film Festival on Tuesday. Each depicted intense, life-altering affairs between women, but where one strove for realism, the other went for surreal, balls-to-the-walls maximalism.

A Woman’s Life, by Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet, stars Léa Drucker as Gabrielle Conti, a 55-year-old surgeon who heads the facial reconstruction department at a run-down French public hospital.

Like her workplace, Gabrielle is buckling under the strain. Hospital politics and complicated cases gnaw at her free time. Barely a scene passes in which she isn’t being pulled in four different directions, answering simultaneous phone calls. Though she had no desire to have children of her own, she helped raise her husband Henri’s kids — with detectable resentment. Early in the film, she and Henri decide to live separately to salvage what remains of her marriage. She must also manage the decline of her mother, who is slipping into Alzheimer’s disease.

At work, a writer named Freida shadows Gabrielle, researching a book she is writing. What her book is about is never addressed, but Gabrielle admits she enjoyed being observed by Freida. In time, this object-subject dynamic turns more mutual and romantic. Gabrielle, initially resistant, embraces the possibility Freida represents. She is sure of everything in her life; this, though, is unfamiliar territory.

The film’s vision of the attraction between these two women is wholesome, with bold notes, but ultimately seems timid. In Freida, Gabrielle sees a version of herself as desirable and accomplished, a balm for her mid-life crisis. But Freida, like all screens, is one-dimensional, and the final image lacks depth.

If A Woman’s Life can feel demure, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is — I mean, the title alone suggests how wild it’s going to get. Hannah Einbinder plays Kris, a young filmmaker whose first independent success has landed her the chance to reboot Camp Miasma, a cult horror classic. Like many franchises, the film was initially a hit, before it was rebooted to death and killed all over again by revisionist film critics, who noted that its depiction of serial killer Little Death was transphobic.

Key to cracking the remake is to visit the reclusive star of its first installment, Billy Preston (played by Gillian Anderson), who now lives in the mountainside camp that served as the set for the original film and hasn’t acted in 35 years. Billy emerges from the shadows dressed like Carmen Sandiego, with a seductive southern drawl and an endless supply of candy. 

Over a KFC dinner, the generational difference between the two becomes apparent — Kris’s queer critique of the capitalist studio system falls on unsympathetic ears — yet they are intrigued enough by one another to see how this might work.

Writer-director Jane Schoenbrun’s ecstatic film is filled with allusions to horror movies — the problematic trans killer of Silence of the Lambs;  the aerial shots of snowy winding roads from The Shining;  the big-breasted, skimpily clad woman running from a maniac in… take your pick of films; and on, and on. The film is very aware of the audience it’s playing to, among them the Gillian Anderson-X Files lesbian fandom and Hacks viewers who adore the show’s inter-generational tension.

While special effects may veer kitsch as the story unfolds in ever more meta and odd ways, the two leads hold the center. Both women mask their sexual insecurities: Anderson’s strange and mesmerizing behaviour stems from a troubling encounter, whereas Einbinder’s deadpan irony belies her own vulnerabilities. It is a story of sexual discovery, but unlike A Woman’s Life,  Schoenbrun is unafraid to get raw and weird. Even a slow-motion sequence involving fried chicken and dipping sauce is more erotic than A Woman’s Life’s  panty, close-up sex scenes. The film swerves between reality and fantasy, arriving at a graphic, sapphic, blood-soaked climax. 

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is due to arrive in cinemas on August 7 with A Woman’s Life on September 9.