The 52: Good Grief

    From June 2023 to June 2024 I'll be watching a lgbtqia+ film each week and coming back here with my thoughts, feelings and plenty of hopes we aren't met with the "kill your gays" trope. I call this The 52.

In describing this film to a friend, I said “It was very sad, but… not necessarily the acting?” and while I could word my text messages a little better, I stand by that.

The music though. My god, the music.

Image credit: Wikipedia

Good Grief follows a couple. Marc and Oliver (after Call Me by Your Name, never speak the name Oliver in my presence again). As you might imagine, this is a film tackling grief, so Oliver dies within the first ten minutes. In fact, while we see the grief of his husband we never actually get to feel impacted by it in terms of knowing who they were as a couple, because we have barely a scene of them together. I couldn’t mourn Oliver because I didn’t know him, I barely saw him, I didn’t get to form a connection with the two as a couple before his death.

And maybe that is in the acting, although Daniel Levy is… glorious and I am bookmarking him as an actor to watch much more of. But there have been films that deal with grief where I have felt genuinely heartbroken. Maybe because we know Oliver is an arsehole basically from the get go, the pain is somehow lessened. We are left wondering: was this ending all for the best, coarse as that might sound.

It’s the mourning of Marc's own life, really, the world he was not privy to, the things he missed out on, the love he still cherishes. Levy truly acted this role, and while I would have liked it to be more in so many different ways…. Good Grief isn’t a bad film. Levy can clearly act, I only think this could’ve been a much more distinctive role if the script had been better.

What really broke my heart, though? It was the music. The music every single time. There is a scene in an art gallery, beautiful and soft and subtle already, but as the actors speak the music swells and it is so perfect that, as sometimes happens with a really good film, I froze.

It was beautiful. It was so, so beautiful.

The real triumph is, above all else, the artistry in the soundscape and how it connects, empowers and elevates scenes, making me care more than any monologue.

Also, Marc's friends were dicks. Yeah, he mightn’t have been the best, but jesus, his husband has only been dead for a year and upon finding out he had lied about XYZ because, you know, he was grieving, and that maybe for him this trip to Paris you're freeballing on had more strings attached to it than you knew, and you still chose to go at him for it? Ew.

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