The 52: Bohemian Rhapsody

    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.

I have a lot of feelings and I don’t think I can express them well, or accurately, or… or at all, truly, because the crux of it is that I think this was a good film. But it was also a very, very bad one.

Image Credit: Wikipedia

Bohemian Rhapsody follows, predominantly, Freddie Mercury’s rise to fame, a difficult story to tell when Freddie himself is not here to weigh in on how it is being told. In death he has absolutely become a figurehead and a legend, but he is a legend who absolutely deserved better than to have his story told for him and for his sickness and death to become the most important facet of this biopic.

I certainly didn’t dislike the film, and watched it with far more attention than many of my recent watches, but there is no denying the whole thing felt… wrong. Unjust. Skewed. Every perception, allegedly seen through Freddie’s own eyes, the words from his lips, the moment where he finds out he is HIV positive - a scene containing only him and his doctor. Continually I found myself faltering, wishing this might be a fictional story so I could watch it without questioning the reality of every second word, because exactly how much fiction are we meant to give a biopic? For many people, this might be their first introduction to the music of Queen and for those people, their vision of Freddie and every other character is coloured by the story being told here, whether it is true or not.

Take the scene where Freddie phones up his ex wife, Mary- his whole relationship with Mary, in fact. After their divorce, Freddie appears determined to keep their relationship strong and he moves Mary into the house next door. He phones her up to say goodnight and together they stand in silence, hopeful and almost childish on one side, and terribly, terribly sad on the other, turning lights on and off. And it just felt wrong.

Freddie’s queerness isn’t as big a part of this story as you might think - his diagnosis with HIV is, but his relationship with men is as quickly - and poorly - knocked aside as it possibly can be. I’d recommend reading this review, which goes into the particulars of how Bohemian Rhapsody did Freddie’s lgbtqia+ identity dirty.

I found it really interesting that Brian and Roger were executive producers on the film, when both of them obviously had to OK the depictions of themselves presented here: one of which is of a true friend, always there for Freddie, and the other almost a bully; it felt like I was seeing caricatures, one an angel and the other a devil, and to know they were apparently fine with that is seriously surprising.

I wish this had been a fictional film about a fictional musician in a fictional band, because for it to be a story about a real person, told after their death, feels impossibly wrong with every minute you watch.

Like things shorter? Follow me on Letterboxd and see my review