The premiere met with a standing ovation and Focus Features has snapped up the worldwide rights to distribute the film ahead of interest from the Weinstein Company and Sony Pictures Classics. Industry excitement concentrated especially on Pariah, a coming-of-age film from director Dee Rees that told the story of Alike, a gay African-American teenager in New York.
It is the first mainstream hit to herald an age when legalised marriage between women might be accepted across the US.Īs Colin Firth demonstrated last year with his Oscar nomination for A Single Man, playing a gay character can be a rewarding challenge for a straight leading actor – and one that often brings critical plaudits.īut this year the lesbian sex scenes on screen have become more explicit and more frequent, particularly when compared to the scarcity of Hollywood sex scenes between gay men.Īt the Sundance film festival in Utah this year, several new films also put lesbianism in the spotlight. Lisa Cholodenko's The Kids Are All Right can claim to be groundbreaking, too. In director Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan, the sexualised rivalry between female leading characters is no longer used as a background note, as it has been in popular thrillers since the heyday of film noir, right up to Nicolas Roeg's Black Widow in 1987 or Barbet Schroeder's Single White Female in 1992. In fact, of course, it is key to what makes both screenplays feel like fresh, modern stories. In both these very different films the gay content is presented as merely incidental to the plot.
In contrast, Portman's brittle portrayal of the prima ballerina at the centre of Black Swan, a part that has already earned her both a Golden Globe and a Bafta, draws her into a lesbian encounter with a rival ballet dancer that is far from domestic. Photograph: Handout The two favourites for the 83rd Oscar for best actress are Natalie Portman and Annette Bening and, if either of them wins, the ceremony will also mark a momentous night for many more women: it will be the night when lesbian sex scenes became part of the cultural mainstream.īening's role as the strong matriarchal figure in a gay family in The Kids Are All Right naturally involves showing the daily intimacies of life with her on-screen partner, played by Julianne Moore. Annette Bening and Julianne Moore in The Kids Are All Right.