Lesbian Movie Reviews: Died / Recanted / Unhappy/ Came out – The Midwife’s Tale

Technically, it's Friday already, so let's get the Friday review blog up so I won't forget all about in the chaos of finding Westercon registration in the morning. (The Town & Country Hotel and Convention Center covers 33 acres, as pointed out by the nice man in the golf cart who delivered me from registration to my building. I hope it will be easier to navigate by daylight than it seemed at midnight.) On to the review!

* * *

I’m re-posting (sometimes in expanded form) a series of reviews of lesbian-themed movies that I originally drew up in answer to a request for recommendations of "good movies involving lesbian romances that don't end up with the protagonists deeply unhappy, dead, or both." To this set of criteria I’ve added the question, “Is the story primarily about coming out?” This set of index questions will necessarily involve some spoilers, but since I'm not reviewing any current releases, I think the statute of limitations has expired.

Many of these items are not currently in print. I'll link each to their imdb.com entry for reference. But for those currently available, Wolfe Video is the go-to distributor for lgbt movies.

* * *

The Midwife's Tale (1995) A costume-romance set up with a framing story of a lesbian mother telling her daughter a bedtime story about a "medieval knightess". It is absolutely delightful as pure fantasy entertainment. The story-in-a-story is, unfortunately, riddled with clichés common to medievaloid fiction, such as the church persecuting the local wisewoman/midwife. But we have the unhappily pregnant lady of the manor falling in love with the midwife's apprentice, followed by drama and imprisonments in towers and damsels in distress and an eventual daring rescue. There is a happy ending at both levels of the story and no lesbians die. The story-in-a-story is, in effect, a coming-out story but the framing one isn't. Alas, the movie experience suffers a bit from being a very low budget film-school project.

Amusingly, one of the early showings of this movie was at the SF Gay and Lesbian Film Festival on one of those rare occasions when I made it over to the City to catch some of the sessions. So I had a chance to squee at the creator about how much I loved it.

Westercon report: Friday

Just a few notes to help me remember how much fun I'm having. I got in really late Thursday evening and did nothing but crash in my room. After almost enough sleep, I wandered down to get a coffee and pastry while waiting for reg to open and bumped into Kathleen Sloan & husband (who I know of old from filking). We got caught up on life in general and somehow the conversation morphed into careers in failure analysis in various industries.

After getting registration squared away, I listened to the panel "No more evil priests in red" asking the question: why/how did sff get stuck on a "religion is inherently evil" theme and what works or authors present religion and spirituality in positive ways that integrate with the story. There was some running joke(?) about how James Blish was not to be mentioned that I didn't get, being unfamiliar with whatever work of his was being referenced. Despite some infelicities of speaker flow and a fair amount of un-nuanced historical generalization, there was good coverage of the topic and many of the usual suggestions for positive authorial treatment in science fiction (Herbert, Bujold, Russell). It was suggested that classic fantasy (e.g., Tolkien, Lewis) has been more comfortable with religious themes and that perhaps science fiction drifted to an opposing pole in quest of being "un-fantasy" as well as there being a wave of "science is god" sentiment. (I think this overlooks a strong theme of "evil priests in red" in fantasy, especially medievaloid or secondary-world settings.)

Bumped into Lisanne Norman whom la_marquise_de_ had suggested I look up and we made dinner plans. After that I took a turn in the dealers room, verified that Cargo Cult Books has both Alpennia books (as he had at BayCon) so I can make appropriate referrals. Had a long chat with Janet Wilson Anderson of alteryears.net, catching up on life and discussing recommended references on non-English costuming of the 1820s (answer: there aren't any good ones).

My first panel as a participant was "How does your writing vary in different lengths?" The panel stayed solidly on topic and was quite lively. There was a good mix of backgrounds and takes on the question, though much agreement on the big picture. Discussions included: How much/how many facets can you fit in a given length? Do you write to a target length or see what the story wants to be? (Both) Should beginners hone their craft on short fiction (much agreement) or plunge into saga length if that's where their imagination takes them? How do markets, especially for e-books, affect length logistics? Do readers have shorter attention spans these days?

Lunch break, and then wandered back to the dealers room. At some point I'd done a little game of reading through the participant bios and noting names of authors who sounded interesting but that I wasn't familiar with, then cross-correlated against what programming they were on. One of the interesting-looking people, Kater Cheek, was at the signing table in the dealers room and I stopped by to allow myself to be talking into buying one of her books and then chatted for a bit with her and the other signer on genre and community and this and that. (I think I may have added another technique to my toolbox for "moving from surviving cons to enjoying them".)

This made me late to the next panel I attended "No Sympathy for the Devil" on how to make irredeemably evil protagonists into relatable characters. A fair amount of discussion on tv & movie villains (e.g., Bond villains, Hannibal, several I didn't quite recognize). One suggestion stuck in my mind: have the "evil" character love someone or something.

Next I dropped by the Broad Universe readings which are often good for finding new authors to taste. Nothing really clicked for me this time, though if you're the sort that likes a supernatural/steam-punk mashup, you might do worse than check out Elizabeth Watasin.

Left that a little early to make sure I got to the next panel I was on: "Endangered Languages". A bit of an odd topic for an SFF con, perhaps, although we tied it in on a number of occasions. It was an extremely lively panel with a lot of provoking and/or intriguing discussions. I made a valiant effort to hold up the side for "endangered languages are not simply of concern as a potentially lost resource for those of us in the dominant culture to 'consume'; the loss itself is typically a symptom of larger underlying patterns of cultural suppression and erasure." (I wasn't the only panelist touching on this, but there was an unfortunate tendency to talk about language loss in terms of what we as outsiders to those linguistic cultures would lose and what we might do to "save" them, which is all kinds of problematic if unexamined.)

After that, Lisanne and I met up and spent several hours over a lovely dinner and long-ranging conversation. So thanks ever so much to la_marquise_de_ for making the connection! And then I decided I needed some alone time for the rest of the evening, and here I am lounging in bed and typing up a con report. I was thinking about trying to get some writing in, but I think I'll opt for extra sleep (since last night got shorted a little).