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Scott Favor (Keanu Reeves) lies on his side in torn jeans. Mike Waters (River Phoenix) stares into the flames and pokes the fire. Terence Davies, director of Distant Voices, Still Lives, The Long Day Closes, The House of Mirth, A Quiet Passion Here was another woman – like me – gleefully taking control of her own sexuality. This bold, defiant gesture of resistance to stultifying patriarchy resonated deeply for me.
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Yet the moment in the film which shifted my DNA was when Rita Wolf’s character, Tania, Omar’s wayward cousin, exposes her breasts through a large glass window into a room full of men pontificating as part of their weekly ritual. Omar and Johnny’s hedonistic, forbidden soapy sex in the launderette was a slap in the face to Conservatives using the Aids epidemic to further demonise gay people. Post-colonial immigrants had never looked so gutsy, messy, funny and desirable. When I hear the refrain “representation matters”, it is this culture-defining film I think of – in particular Kureishi’s ironic, playful script, smashing multiple demeaning stereotypes of British Asians. At its heart, an unlikely love story between Daniel Day-Lewis’s skinhead, Johnny, and Gordon Warnecke’s Omar, a dutiful Pakistani son. Written by Hanif Kureishi and directed by Stephen Frears, it revealed a complex picture of Thatcher’s Britain. My Beautiful Laundrette came at me like a tsunami. Rita Wolf, left, with Gordon Warnecke and Daniel Day Lewis in My Beautiful Laundrette. Pratibha Parmar, director of Nina’s Heavenly Delights, Alice Walker: Beauty in Truth and Khush Baring breasts in My Beautiful Laundrette I may not have got my teenage kiss against the tree, but luckily, whenever I hear Mama Cass, it feels as if I did. I never got to snog the boy I longed for across the classroom.īut here it was, up on the screen, happening for Jamie and Ste, and the audience was cheering them along. Our school crushes could rarely be acknowledged, let alone acted on. There’s such joy and hope in this scene, an antidote to the pain and shame that was a reality for many LGBT kids coming of age in the 80s and 90s. It looks pretty innocent now, but it felt quietly revolutionary back then. It is a glorious moment that encapsulates that giddy rush of first love, silly and important all at the same time. Afterwards, as Mama Cass sings Make Your Own Kind of Music, they chase each other through the woods and make out against a tree. Halfway through the film, on a hot summer night, the two teenage boys sneak off to a gay pub for the first time in their lives. The kiss against the tree in Beautiful ThingĪndrew Haigh, director of Weekend, 45 Years, Lean on Peteīeautiful Thing may not be the most radical film in queer cinema, but its release in 1996 helped nudge my 23-year-old self out of the closet.
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Derek was in an amazing period of film-making where he would shoot in 8mm film, transfer to video to edit and to finish on 35mm. Made with mostly small handheld cameras, I saw this right before I made my film Drugstore Cowboy and realised that I had needed to see Derek’s great film a little earlier than I had, because within this film there were all the potential stylistic inspirations I needed to film Drugstore which I had resigned to shoot with clunky Panavision.
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Rock’n’roll blares, as England falls, a fairy dances, beautiful soldiers drink vodka and have gay sex. An amazing soundtrack by the genius Simon Turner.
A Caravaggio, and beautiful Tilda Swinton valiantly defaces her ballgown and the visuals of an England going past us in burning rubble and bright home movies. A skinhead boy shoots up light flares dances and stomps. Derek Jarman’s The Last of England is an amazing barrage of memories, obsessions, cataclysmic visions, where Derek plays a gay memoirist writing his thoughts down.