Director: Georgia Oakley (UK). Year of release: 2022
Tyneside, 1988. I guess it’s Saturday night, as Blind Date is just starting. As we watch a woman from behind dying her hair, in the background Cilla Black is promising the possibility of (strictly heterosexual) love to her contestants. Once Blind Date is over, we follow the woman to a downstairs bar, where she meets up with her friends, all of them female. She kisses one of them on the lips.
Jean is a PE teacher. She used to teach at the local school, but moved to one across town to avoid mixing her social and working life. She is also a lesbian. The Thatcher government is entrenched in power and whenever the radio’s on we hear government ministers talking about Clause 28 (later Section 28) the law against “promoting homosexuality in schools”. Billboards display threatening but not really informative adverts about preventing AIDS.
Unlike her partner Viv – short haired, pierced, with feminist jewellery, a leather jacket, and an attitude, Jean is closeted at work. She silently listens to her fellow teachers agree with each other that “children must be protected”. In fact, she barely talks to them at all, eating alone at lunch time with a table full of teachers behind her and one full of pupils in front. In class she is animated, and apparently has a good relationship with her students, as long as they keep a respectful distance
Viv does not approve of Jean watching Blind Date, which she claims reinforces stereotypes. She doesn’t use the word “heteronormative”, as we’re still in the 1980s, but that’s what she means. When Jean protests that not everything is political, Viv assures her that of course it is. Jean and Viv’s relationship largely consists of Viv despairing at her partner’s timidity and Jean wondering why she can’t be left alone. Well that, and good sex.
One day, a new girl arrives at school. Lois finds it difficult to get on with the other girls, especially her nemesis Siobhan. She asks if she can sit out the first PE lesson as she doesn’t have any kit. Ever the good teacher, Jean tries to help Lois get involved, finding her gym clothes and encouraging her to join the netball team. The extra attention that Jean gives to Lois seems to rub Siobhan up the wrong way.
Jean has her life more or less under control until one evening when she’s out with friends in a gay bar. Ironically, for what is going to happen, graffitti in the bar’s toilets say “resisting the shame régime.” In walks Lois and Jean ducks into the shadows. But Lois spies her teacher, and starts to chat with Jean’s friends. Jean acts as if she doesn’t know their new companion, but when Lois goes to the toilet, Jean takes her aside and warns her off, asking her find a different bar, any bar.
Blue Jean’s strength is its willingness to visit moral grey areas. Jean is not a hero and often acts out of self-interest. She is well aware that any insinuation of extra-curricular activities with her 15-year old pupil could cost her her job. But it’s not just that. She prefers an easy life. Like her unwillingness to come out at school, this may not be the right thing to do but it is perfectly understandable behaviour. Jean is a gym teacher, not a superhero.
Things get worse when Lois and Siobhan have a spat in the girls’ changing rooms. We witness what leads up to the spat, but it was unclear to me whether Jean – the only other person in the room – does. Either way, she either refuses to believe Lois’s version of what happened, or – equally possible – sees a way of getting out her current dilemma if Lois gets suspended. Lois looks mortified that her idol can betray her like this.
This is a relatively slight film, which doesn’t dig too deeply, but it does provide us with characters who are both sympathetic and flawed. While it shows that people, particularly Jean, sometimes take the wrong decisions which hurt other people, and herself. But we also recognise that because of the prevailing atmosphere, none of the decisions on offer is that great. Viv is correct. Everything is political.
There are positives and negatives about setting the film around the background of Section 28. On the one hand, there is the danger that the audience may think that this is a problem that has gone away, so it is no longer necessary for LGBT people to closet themselves. As if the only threat to Jean’s ability to live equally is that of an evil law. Others may just not be old enough to remember how repressive Thatcher’s Britain was, so can’t understand the pressure Jean is under.
I think the film largely works because it is more interested in telling Jean’s personal story than being a treatise on something which happened 35 years ago (though it’s great to be reminded of the abseiling lesbians who invaded the House of Lords). Jean seems to be a naturally shy person. Even when she’s a a party with her friends she occasionally just needs to leave the room, because she needs a break from other people.
So, all in all, it’s a film worth watching, even if it rarely gets much deeper than your average Blind Date episode. But, one of the things it is surely arguing is that there’s nothing wrong with watching Blind Date once in a while. This is director Georgia Oakley’s first film, and she has plenty of time to develop into making more sophisticated films. Until then, she’s provided us with characters we care for and in whose fate we can invest. That’s more than enough to be getting on with.
CinePhil 