The writer-director Ron Peck, who died just before Christmas, earned his place in British cinema history on the strength of a single film: 1978's Nighthawks, a rough-edged, naturalistic study of a gay geography teacher at an inner-London school, obliged to patrol the boundary he'd set for himself between his day job and his party-hearty social life. With her terrific debut Blue Jean, Georgia Oakley offers a refining of the same set-up, even as she turns it in the direction of the commercial thriller. Oakley's heroine Jean (Rosy McEwen) is a lesbian PE teacher in a North East coastal town ten years on from the Peck film, at a point when the Thatcher government had mandate enough to push through Clause 28, a legislative agenda specifically intended to root out and disenfranchise these nefarious queers Tory MPs felt were subverting British society. As someone entrusted with shaping the minds and bodies of the Red Wall's children, we sense Jean is tiptoeing on thin ice even before problem student Lois (Lucy Halliday) walks into the gay bar she's taken to drinking in. A scene evoking a familiar sixth-form weirdness - seeing a teacher during a night on the town - assumes an additional edge in this new context: now Jean's secret is out in the public domain, at a time where there are serious consequences for having such secrets to keep. "Not everything is political," Jean blithely retorts to on-off lover Viv (Kerrie Hayes) after the latter deigns to suggest Cilla Black's godawful Blind Date is a state-sponsored plot to batter the British public into heteronormative submission. Well, here's our Georgia with a quick - and very timely - reminder: it is, you know.
One of the surprises of Oakley's film is that it doesn't quite play out the way you suspect, which is to say it keeps a wise distance from Fatal Attraction. Instead, the tension manifests as a low-level, everyday disquiet; the girl gets inside the teacher's head, not her bed. Nevertheless, Jean can't sleep, and she can't relax, especially given the comments made by colleagues unaware they themselves have a lesbian in their midst. At the same time, a strange but perhaps not entirely unexpected bond develops between Jean and Lois, converting outcast Lois into the super-sub of the school netball team. (This is likely the only thriller you'll have seen where netball serves as a plot point, the girls' locker room proving as reactionary in its attitudes as the staff room upstairs.) That after-hours encounter reveals to Jean and Lois both that they're not alone; they are, instead, living parallel secret lives. Oakley, we sense, isn't just prising open Thatcher's crypt for the hell of it (though there the old bat is, taking up dispatch-box arms against what she dubs "the inalienable right of children to be gay"), and she's not here to prey on pre-existing fears or spark another moral panic. (Everybody's jumpy enough nowadays as it is.) Instead, quietly and rather brilliantly, Blue Jean begins to formulate its own counterargument in favour of gay teachers: that they might be able to share a measure of life experience, or the right words of encouragement, at a moment when it doesn't take much to make a kid feel like a pariah.
The film builds that rhetorical force in large part by getting the details right. It's recognisably 1980s, without going full dayglo legwarmer on us; there's a bit of "Blue Monday", but otherwise the soundtrack goes for less familiar (and thus presumably cheaper to licence) pop. All the while, Oakley reveals herself as an exceptional director of actors. McEwen, a newcomer to this viewer, has the same upright alertness Tilda Swinton has, and no less of an ability to loose a tell-tale tremor across a snow-white face, like a ripple on a lake. (I couldn't tell whether this was a make-up choice or mere subdermal serendipity, but the rash observed on her neck during a pivotal scene in the headmaster's office is uncomfortably persuasive.) She constructs a loving but intriguingly tentative bond with Hayes, here pierced and tatted and all but unrecognisable from the juvenile lead who energised 2009's Kicks; there's a deft sketch of a small but vibrant and defiant gay community; and, back at school, the teenagers are properly inchoate, not stage-schoolers who wouldn't be seen dead in Blyth. (No surprise, come the end credits, to see the name Shaheen Baig, the casting director who's done as much as anyone to shake up the look and sound of British cinema these past two decades.) Right through to a third-act crisis in which our sympathies are torn every which way, Oakley's deft, economical scripting puts her protagonist in a bind without ever appearing to force the issue; her raw materials are those unspoken but deeply felt pressures that follow from having to justify who you are, and why you have every right to remain in the room. It's identifiably a 21st century movie about identity. But it's also a really smart and gripping movie, however you identify, whether or not you can remember this grim period of recent British history.
Blue Jean opens in selected cinemas from Friday, with previews across the country from tonight.
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