There’s been a sudden, although long overdue, surge in films by and about lesbians. They’ve hit the mainstream so hard in the last few years that even my late-fifties, Sunday Times-reading mum saw The Favourite (2018) in the cinema, of her own accord. (She didn’t really like it.)
Many of these films have been adapted from novels, often from the backlist of women more famous for other works. These adaptations have the benefit of bringing these novels to a wider audience and bringing much-needed income to the author. However, they also bring up the thorny issue of how to best translate queer women’s words into a visual medium like film in a way that does them justice.
To illustrate this problem, I’m going to talk about two films: the almost universally lauded Carol (2015) and the well-received Disobedience (2017).
In both of these stories, two women enter a relationship that goes against the homophobic norms of their society and must make a choice between conformity and choosing to live authentically.
In both film adaptations, significant changes are made to the source material, both novels written by women. One detail that caught my attention in the way both novels were adapted was that in both, the protagonist’s profession is changed. Originally, The Price of Salt’s Therese is an aspiring theatrical set designer, and Disobedience’s Ronit is a high-flying financial analyst. In the film adaptations, they have the same job: photographer.
In both films, this change signals a refocusing on the visual as a source of meaning. In The Price of Salt, seeing and being seen are inherently linked to power and control. When Therese first sees Carol, “their eyes met at the same instant…her eyes were grey, colourless, yet dominant as light or fire, and, caught by them, Therese could not look away.” Highsmith is acutely aware of the power that can be exerted by vision and recognition. In the case of queer women being seen and recognised by the heterosexual world, it is an oppressive force. Yet between Therese and Carol, it is the tender sense of recognition and familiarity when she meets the woman she will love.
For queer women in 1950s America, to be seen and identified is to become the subject of homophobic discourse. Perhaps more than in any other period of American history, the 1950s were marked by intense public homophobia, linked to the ‘lavender scare’ which took place as a result of Cold War political paranoia. Being seen was dangerous, a danger echoed in the anxiety felt by Disobedience’s Esti and Ronit about being visibly queer in their Orthodox Jewish community.
The way these films, and the inevitable tie-in reissue of the novels, are marketed is also significant. Film tie-ins seem to love intense close-ups for their jackets. As one friend commented at my book club when we discussed Disobedience,“it’s all face”.
Does focusing so heavily on the movie-star good looks of the actors detract from the original meaning? More importantly, when will we see a major lesbian film that’s not about beautiful people falling in love?
Another significant change is that both adaptations added explicit sex scenes that were only implied in the source material.
While these are both valid artistic choices by the filmmakers — which in the case of Carol simply fills in an aspect of the story that would have been difficult to get past censors when the source novel The Price of Salt was published in 1952 — they also represent a refocusing of the narrative. While The Price of Saltwas always a romance, albeit one with a more noirish edge than the softer film adaptation, the novel Disobedience is about nostalgia, community and faith. The romance between Esti and Ronit has long passed, leaving a tale far more interesting and nuanced than a classic “forbidden love” narrative. This feels lessened in the film, possibly to its detriment.
It’s also surely problematic that the big closing speech of the novel, given by Esti who breaks the convention against women speaking in the synagogue, is in the film given to her husband Dovid. The power of words and their importance in the Jewish faith is a central theme in Disobedience, so this feels like a betrayal of the novel’s intentions.
What’s at stake here is the question of whether queer women are merely seen and not heard, or whether they can have a real voice in mainstream film. An obvious solution is to hire more lesbian and bisexual women to direct for these projects. Yet that seems like too reductive a solution, especially when the brilliant and sensitive adaptation Carol was directed by a gay man, Todd Haynes.
Now that there’s space for these films to exist in the mainstream, it would be wonderful to see more high-profile films about queer women that aren’t love stories. A great example of this would be 2018′s Can You Ever Forgive Me? in which Melissa McCarthy plays author and literary forger Lee Israel, whose queerness is important to the film but not its central theme.
While Carol soars, I would consider Disobedience to be a decent film but a poor adaptation. But perhaps that’s okay. Until quite recently, lesbian and queer-centric films haven’t had room to fail without it being seen to reflect poorly on all such films. Now that there’s more space to breathe, we can only hope that lesbian films will be judged on their own artistic merits and not on how well they succeed in representing the community. There’s a wealth of source material out there just waiting for a great film adaptation. Let’s hope that the next lesbian blockbuster (could you imagine saying that even five years ago?) will be treated with sensitivity, and take bigger risks than ever before.
Book, Bell & Candle 