The Refocus Film Festival awarded its Audience Choice Award to She’s the He, the debut feature from director Siobhan McCarthy. In it, high school best friends Ethan and Alex find themselves tangled up in a queer coming-of-age. Alex (Nico Carney), desperate to impress his dream girl, insists that they pretend to be trans women in order to grow closer to her. Despite obvious strong resistance to this ridiculous and harmful plan, Ethan (Misha Osherovich) goes along with it, only to discover that this might be more than just playing dress-up. Something is being awakened within her.
The film is a hilarious and touching entry into the high-school-loser genre, standing alongside recents like Bottoms and classics like American Pie. The film scathingly satirizes the disturbing lengths boys will go in the hopes of getting laid and the annoyingly funny missteps of T-shirt queer allyship. One of the most tender scenes in the film is when Ethan tries to articulate why she feels the way she does to her crush. Here, Osherovich beautifully invokes sensitivity and desire, giving this teen flick its heart, a tenderness often ignored in today’s political climate.
Several films at the festival centered around the topics of queerness and desire, both its rewards and its limitations.
In Fucktoys, writer, director and star Annapurna Sriram impressively careens between the allure of sex work, replete with gorgeously silhouetted dances, and the not-so-glamorous reality in which clients can easily demean and devalue the very people they desire.
But the film shows that hot, consensual sex does not have to be pretty or even clean, instead spotlighting that there is freedom in filth. Sriram, as protagonist AP, boasts that she loves trash, and that if you do too, “You’re going to love me!” Her companion Danni (Sadie Scott) is introduced mid-brawl, smiling with blood in their teeth, a display of visceral, primal desire. It was also Scott’s first time playing a nonbinary character on film, and their passionate charm radiates off the screen.
Hedda, the latest film by Nia DaCosta, also sees queer women navigating ugliness, this time coming from within. Tessa Thompson, as the titular menace, embraces her jealous and manipulative side when she learns that her former lover Eileen (Nina Hoss) has taken up a new darling, Thea (Imogen Poots). What could go wrong?
The adaptation of the play by Henrik Ibsen meditates on how queer women must navigate spaces dominated by men, in which intellect and confidence are lifelines to success. Eileen is a brilliant writer, but as a white scholar, she has somewhat of a fighting chance to be respected on a level closer to her male colleagues. Hedda, a Black woman and the wife of scholar George, does not even have that. As Eileen notes, Hedda finds her power in her boredom, getting creative, and ultimately hurtful, in how she wields her intelligence.
Thompson and Hoss play off each other incredibly, their scenes pulsating with temperamental desire as both women critique the patriarchal, scandalized view of sex which bogs them down. However, Hedda finds that she would rather sink others and herself than swim.
Play it as it Lays, a retrospective title from Refocus, follows this thread of romantic apathy. Joan Didion co-wrote the screenplay for her novel with her husband, John Gregory Dunne, and together they weave a tragic tale about a love, a city and a life grown cold. Here, the most bedroom intimacy you’ll find is when Maria (Tuesday Weld) cradles a depressed and dying B.Z. (Anthony Perkins).
More than 50 years after its release, the hazy gloom shrouding these characters and their relationships still stings. The film opens and closes on Maria strolling around a courtyard, her direct address to the camera in the final scene provoking audible whispers of stunned recognition from the audience on that final day of the festival.
These Refocus titles explore the rise and fall of love and sex, the transformative potential of emotional bonds, and the aftermath of transactional and hollow relationships.