Georgia Oakley (2022)

North-East England, 1988.  As twenty-something Jean (Rosy McEwen) drives to the secondary school where she’s a PE and games teacher, the BBC Today programme news story on her car radio is the Thatcher government’s upcoming ‘Section 28’ legislation to prohibit the ‘promotion of homosexuality’ by local authorities.  Jean turns off the radio but can’t do much about a Tory poster on the billboard she drives past each working day – a poster urging ‘traditional values’ and ‘keep politics out of education’ (which brings pots and kettles to mind).  Before she goes out on a Saturday evening, Jean watches Blind Date – reviled as anti-gay propaganda by Viv (Kerrie Hayes), Jean’s lover.  The two spend the rest of the evening at their usual bar with friends Ace (Stacy Abalogun) and Debbie (Amy Booth-Steel), who, like Viv, are forthrightly lesbian.  Jean gets on well with them but seems at a remove from the group, in how she looks and what she says.  At school, she keeps her sexual orientation a secret, her private life just that.  As she walks through the changing rooms after a games lesson, a couple of undressed girls giggle, ‘Hey, get lost, dyke’, but without seeming to mean it.  When other teachers invite Jean out for a Friday night drink, she always makes her excuses.  The school is some way from her home and social network.  Jean doesn’t mind the lengthy commute:  it’s reassuring proof of the distance between her two worlds.

It’s no surprise that the storyline of Blue Jean turns the title character’s carefully compartmentalised life upside down.  Her partnership with Viv founders, thanks to Jean’s in-and-out-of-the-closet tendencies and to how, in particular, these play out in relation to a new pupil at Jean’s school.  But this predictability doesn’t stop writer-director Georgia Oakley’s debut feature from being a good film, with two major strengths.  The first is Rosy McEwen who, from the start, embodies Jean’s vigilant unease subtly but incisively.  Although she deals in a teacher’s usual way with pupils whispering in class, McEwen shows in her face, in a split second, Jean’s nervousness that they may be whispering about her.  Blue Jean’s other chief virtue is that Georgia Oakley, while making clear the corrosive consequences of Jean’s failure to embrace her sexuality, nevertheless takes her anxieties seriously.  As the title implies, Jean’s blue because she’s living a lie but the narrative does justice to the challenge of her telling the truth.  Born in the year in which her story is set, Oakley is generous and imaginative enough to show sympathy for the protagonist’s predicament beyond simply making the point that Clause 28 encouraged people like Jean to deny their sexual identity.  And Oakley recreates this bygone age with some nice period details.  Jean makes a living in physical education but she’s a heavy smoker.  At home she plays a tape that teaches its listeners to relax – to highly counterproductive effect when the tape gets snarled up in Jean’s cassette player.

The new pupil and plot catalyst is sixteen-year-old Lois (Lucy Halliday), a Scottish girl who lives on the wrong side of the tracks.  One Saturday night, she turns up at the bar frequented by Jean, Viv et al.  Jean and Lois exchange looks but no words about this, either in the bar or at school next week.  Lois joins the netball team that Jean coaches, where her aptitude and attitude instantly put her at loggerheads with Siobhan (Lydia Page), hitherto the team’s star player.  When Lois next comes to the gay bar, there is a confrontation with Jean, who anxiously warns her off.  The confrontation takes place in the bar toilets:  Viv sees Jean and Lois emerging from them and draws the wrong conclusion.  Jean explains who Lois; Viv is furiously unimpressed by Jean’s fearful reaction to being spotted in queer company.  At school, rising tensions between Siobhan and Lois culminate in a post-netball-practice fight, which Jean breaks up, followed by an incident in the showers, part of which Jean happens to witness.  Siobhan provokes the fight by taunting Lois as a virgin and a lesbian.  In the showers, she seduces Lois and they’re kissing hungrily when Jean walks past.  At this point, Siobhan breaks away, screaming claims that Lois has assaulted her.  The girls are called in by Paula (Lainey Shaw), Jean’s immediate boss and prejudiced in Siobhan’s favour, to give their accounts of what happened.  Jean doesn’t contradict Siobhan’s version of events and Lois is suspended from school.

Georgia Oakley validates what seem like plotting contrivances by rooting them in character or returning to them fruitfully.  Jean makes a mess of things vis-à-vis Lois at nearly every turn:  how so, when Jean is such a cautious self-protector?   Because she hasn’t factored in this kind of unexpected intervention – Lois is too young to be in the bar, which isn’t near the school.  So Jean is Jean is unprecedentedly panicked:  Section 28 headlines and undaunted Viv’s demands increase the panic.   In an early scene, Sasha (Aoife Kennan), Jean’s sister, calls unexpectedly at her flat:  Sasha’s mother-in-law has been rushed into hospital and urgently needs a babysitter for her five-year-old son, Sam.  When the doorbell rings, Jean and Viv are making love; once Sasha has gone, leaving Sam with Jean, Viv reappears and the little boy demands to know who she is; Jean’s reply – ‘my friend’ – seems reasonable but Viv leaves in a huff.  For a while, this bit seems nothing more than an awkward way of introducing the fault line in Jean’s and Viv’s relationship but its meanings are transformed by a later scene, when Jean goes for lunch at the home of Sasha and her dreary husband, Tim (Scott Turnbull).  A well-written conversation between the sisters, while Tim’s out of the room, reveals that Sam told Sasha about Viv.  And more:  Jean’s annoyed to see that the family photos on Sasha’s mantelpiece still include one of Jean’s own wedding day – she has asked Sasha before to take it down.  Sasha refuses:  she doesn’t ‘think it’s right that you want to erase part of your life – that you expect us to’.  She takes Jean to task for not telling her, before she dropped Sam off that night, that ‘you had a woman there’.

There are some clumsy things in the film, to be sure.  The Blind Date clips make their point about hetero-normative media monopoly in the 1980s but one would have been enough:  it’s hard to believe that Jean, who has tried and abandoned straight romance, keeps watching the show, even in a spirit of masochism.  An excerpt from a BBC TV news bulletin about women ‘commandos’ abseiling into the House of Lords to protest the Clause 28 legislation is worth including but how come the (surprisingly numerous) PE teachers at Jean’s school are all gathered round a staffroom television to watch?   Oakley then makes things worse by parcelling out crudely obvious reactions to the news from the older teachers:  Paula commends the legislation (‘Young people have such vulnerable minds’); Dave (Deka Walmsley) jokes about the protesters’ appearance (‘Wouldn’t wanna run into them women in a dark alley – they’d ‘ave ya guts for garters, they would’).  At Sam’s birthday party, Jean gets trapped in a gruesome conversation with Tim’s ex-colleague, Craig (Edmund Wiseman):  when he eventually asks, ‘Got a man on the scene at the moment then have you, Jean?’ she finds herself replying, ‘No, I haven’t … I’m a lesbian’.  It’s ironically effective that she comes clean at a public gathering as a desperate means of escaping it but the follow-up sequence is one cliché after another.  Jean sits in Sasha and Tim’s garden with just her cigarette for company.  She has a laughing-crying jag then an epiphany as she sees horses in the distance, cantering free.  (This was made worse watching Blue Jean at BFI where the current Lloyds Bank commercial is always played these days between the trailers and the main film.)

Yet more of Blue Jean works well – and Oakley brings off some difficult things, including the nice distinction between Jean’s ‘non-promotion’ and concealment of her sexuality.  The damaging consequences of her discretion, especially her failure to contradict Siobhan’s lie, register strongly but not melodramatically.  Even in the film’s relatively upbeat climax, Oakley avoids the easy option of simply dissolving Jean’s ambivalence.  Trying to make amends to Lois, Jean persuades her to come along to a birthday party for Debbie.  The party is subsidised by a ‘bog fund’:  Ace explains to Lois that ‘any poor lesbians in the North East’ can apply for support to this fund, which depends considerably on the likes of Jean – ‘lesbians with “proper” jobs’.  Viv’s at the party; she and Jean exchange friendly words but there’s no suggestion they’ll get back together.  This time, when Jean leaves the room where the party’s happening and has a solitary smoke on a balcony outside, she’s calmly reflective (and there’s not a black horse to be seen in the urban nightscape she looks out on).  Next morning, when she drives to work, the Tory poster is still in evidence but Jean arrives at school with a smile on her face.  That uncharacteristic smile is seriously premature – Clause 28 was eventually repealed in 2003 – and may even be willed.  But it’s good to see.

10 February 2023