The 52: Blue Jean

    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.

So somehow I got to thinking this was based on a true story and I was just really confused that this was the story - out of all the characters in the film - chosen to be told, because Jean isn’t a good person.

Image Source: Wikipedia

Anytime I watch a film about someone who isn’t inherently bad, but certainly isn’t the hero of their story, I… falter. Of course books about villains are far more common (I spent 10 years working on my own), but Jean isn’t a villain. And yet her fear, her justifiable fear, leads her to letting down the people who need her the most, to her becoming a person who sacrifices others in really horrific ways to keep herself safe, and that makes me really mad.

Set in 80s Britain against the ruinous touch of Thatcher’s government, Jean is a PE teacher who is fully aware she would lose her job if it got out that she’s a lesbian. She is quiet, reserved, has the minimal contact required with her peers and, when a girl who is rumoured to be a lesbian joins her class, it all starts to fall apart.

We see Jean from a few differing perspectives: that of herself, her girlfriend, her friends. We see her detached from everyone, we see her through the eyes of her family, her nephew. We see her through the eyes of the student who wants to idolise her. Worst of all we see her through our own eyes and it is here, I think, we get the truth. Jean isn’t evil or cruel or inherently bad. She lives in a world where her very self is criminalised, surrounded by friends and peers who look up to her (and down on her) for having what they deem a "proper job", yet at the very same time doing things that could make her lose that job. She is frightened and angry and it is amidst this that she starts to fall, and we begin to wonder: was this the real Jean, all along? Or was she better than this?

The catastrophe that happens is… hard to bear witness to, and I think everyone let her off too easily, everyone except Jean herself.  There was a good portion of the film where I felt… heard or seen, I suppose, and it was very beautiful. But there was a bigger portion where I was just angry and frustrated.

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