The 52: The Half of it
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.
“Love makes your screwy. Don’t you get screwy?”
The Half of It is one of the most basic film premises you can get: person X helps person Y woo person Z… only person X is also in love with person Z and it all goes pear shaped.
I wasn’t mad to see a queer version of the same old story, and it wasn’t bad by any means, but it wasn’t fresh (“that’s new and different!”) and it employed, with zero consequences, cheating, which is a theme that just infuriates me.
So we have Ellie. She does everyone’s homework and even the teachers don’t care because she’s such a good writer that it’s a joy to read more of her work. Then we have Paul, who is hopelessly in love. WHO is he in love with? Smart, funny, clever Aster, and he definitely can’t win her over with his own words, which is where Ellie comes in.
Aster is unbelievably oblivious, honestly, like Ellie and Paul make this impossible situation work for way too long without her even questioning anything. I’m a better writer than I am a speaker, and I'm sure the distinction is noticeable to anyone, but if I was THAT DIFFERENT? I would hope it would be ruddy obvious that either someone was ghost writing my every word or an alien had taken possession of my mouth.
And the ploy continues and Ellie falls harder for Aster she becomes ever more poetic, which just makes Aster falls harder for Paul, while Paul is just... in love. He doesn’t seem to care Aster is already with another guy, and it certainly doesn’t stop Aster, which I h a t e - do you get to be mad at being led on when you, for months, have been cheating on your longterm boyfriend who proposes to you? Really, Aster, is that a high ground you think you get to stand on? (Obviously every situation is unique and Aster is in a difficult situation where the conservatory nature and religion of the town and her family puts a heavy pressure to conform on her shoulders, but don’t cheat. She did not have to cheat, there was no reason for her to cheat, and they never even acknowledge, any one of them, that she’s been cheating this entire time!)
Paul is a fairly joyous character. He’s a good friend and a kind person and his relationship with Ellie is pretty lovely, once they really start to bond, and he very much feels like the character who gets the worst of it. He forms as genuine relationships as he is able, and sure, employing Ellie in the first place was problematic, but he didn’t deserve to go through the pain he did. His reaction to Ellie’s sexuality is a difficult one to watch, especially coming from such an entirely kind character - it hurt. Those sort of words… are always going to hurt.
There is a scene, my favourite scene, where Ellie and Aster go to a pond. It is quiet and dreamy and Aster says how there is a best part in every song, and it was perfect in every single way, and I wanted to live in the feeling of that moment for far longer than it lasted.
Writing this review made me realise I actually have a lot more issues with this film than I realised! But that’s ok. It’s only THE HALF OF IT *snaps fingers*
And finally, a quote: "My dad… he isn’t a nazi exactly. but he can be pretty strict."
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