Fly The Flag
One of the best British films of the year, Blue Jean looks back on the past to comment on where we are today. Breakout writer Fran Bowden makes her interviewing debut to meet the film’s team to discuss queer history, social realism, and what we can do next.
For Jean, a PE teacher, aunt and girlfriend, letting her mask slip, even once, is out of the question. Every interaction is its own exacting performance, and every performance must be perfect. Teaching “the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship” is against the law. From 1988 until 2003, section 28 of the Local Government Act forbade it.
A year into Thatcher’s third term, Tyneside is in a post-industrial, pre-gentrified limbo, all past and seemingly no future. But rarely has the northeast, let alone its queer community, been so attentively brought to screen as in Blue Jean. Intimate, at times claustrophobic, the film is anchored by a chameleonic lead performance from Rosy McEwen as Jean, and an authentic sense of this late ‘80s locale. Through its haunting evocation of a long-forgotten world just out of reach, Georgia Oakley’s feature-length debut is both a nightmare and a dream of what was and what might have been.
Ahead of the film’s theatrical release, MASSIVE spoke to Oakley and McEwen about abseiling lesbians, being misleadingly labelled as social realist, and some of the parallels between then and now.
MASSIVE: For many younger viewers, I imagine Blue Jean will be their first introduction to Section 28. How did you both discover it?
Georgia Oakley: I didn’t know anything about Section 28. I was researching another project and came across a newspaper article about the lesbian abseilers who had abseiled into the House of Lords during the debate on Section 28, and through finding that image I did a little digging on what it was. I couldn’t believe that it had been brought in the year I was born, and was in effect pretty much the whole time I was at school. I started to piece together the ways in which my life had been affected by it without me even knowing it.
Just after we started developing the film in 2018, we found that there was a little bit about it in the press because of the 30th anniversary, but prior to that it was something that you really had to dig to find any coverage. We spoke to some of the younger actors in the film who are teenagers, and they hadn’t heard of it either. The legacy of it is so clear, but there’s really been very little.
Rosy McEwen: I didn’t know anything about it until I read the script, and it was abolished in 2003 so I think I must have been about 10. I had spent that much time at school and was still completely unaware of it and unaware of it then being abolished. I don’t remember anything, which is exactly why I wanted to be part of telling the story because I just felt like there hadn’t been enough space carved out for it and for the women and people who lived through it.
The location of the film felt more like a character than a backdrop. As a Geordie, I’m curious about your own connection to Newcastle and the Northeast.
GO: The research process of the film involved speaking to multiple women who had lived experience of being lesbian PE teachers under Section 28 and we interviewed those women and spent a lot of time with them, and we started to focus on two women in particular. Both of these women had worked in Northern cities, so it became quite clear that the film would need to be set in one. Newcastle was somewhere I had studied and lived and I have lots of family that still live up there, so I knew the geography of the city and I knew all the different neighbourhoods. I wanted to find a city that would work geographically so that I could tie in the texture of Jean’s story into the geography.
The women we spoke to had gone to great lengths to create these physical barriers between where they lived and where they worked or where they lived and the queer bars that they frequented, so that they minimised the chances of running into students. Because I knew Newcastle, I had this image of it. I think for a while Jean used to cross the Tyne on a ferry because she lives in North Shields and the school is supposed to be in South Shields, and that geographical barrier was always part of the film even if you can’t tell in the final cut that’s what’s happening.
We spent a lot of time speaking to members of the queer community who had been a part of the scene in the ‘80s. I didn’t want to set it in Manchester, because Manchester was obviously the queer capital at that time. Newcastle was interesting to me because people did travel to visit the queer scene there. There was the Pink Triangle, there were various bars, we had photographs we could look at of those places and we could meet the owners, but it wasn’t quite as on the map as Manchester.
Also, for a long time there was a scene in the film from a rally that had taken place in Newcastle, on the Tyne, and this amazing guy, Bob Crossman, had made a speech that was so beautiful and that was part of the film too but, in the end, we had to lose things.
Newcastle is more commonly associated with the social realism of someone like Ken Loach in cinema, but Blue Jean has a very distinctive look, especially in its use of colour. How did you arrive at the film’s visual language?
GO: It was always the intention to make a film that had a slightly heightened look. Realism wasn’t our be-all and end-all. We wanted to take this moment and present it almost as if we were looking back at it through somebody's memory, so not all of the details would be exactly as they were. Part of that was to do with wanting to create a film that felt of the time, but also like it was in conversation with things that are going on now.
Each location had a different colour palette as a kind of visual guide. The story for us was a lot about how Jean’s behaviour and anxiety levels change as we move her from one location to another.
I think it’s also just to do with my sensibility as a filmmaker. Social realism is just not my style. But having said that, there are a lot of people who have written about the film and called it a social realist film!
No matter where she is, Jean’s constantly having to blend into her surroundings by keeping public and private separate. Rosy, as a performer tasked with navigating these different spaces, what was it like inhabiting this character?
RM: I think there were just so many masks for Jean to juggle, and even within the school the person she is in the staff room with the teachers is very different to the person she is with kids in the sports hall, to the person she is walking down the corridor. As Georgia said, her fear levels are continuously rising and falling and it feels like the only place she is really safe is at home alone. But then when she’s with her girlfriend, Viv, it brings out a side to her that she can’t even access when she’s alone.
It’s very much a balancing of different parts of her, and usually when you film non-chronologically and you do it by location it can be quite confusing because you’re like “Oh, we’re here in this scene,” but it’s actually at the end of the film. In terms of Jean, it was really helpful because she was this whole person in every different place so it ended up being one of the most positive experiences I’ve had shooting non-chronologically.
Were there any films or directors who influenced your approach?
GO: Right at the beginning, we did say 2017’s 120 Beats Per Minute was a reference in terms of their treatment of the period and the fact that it was going to be a film about individuals and individual, personal costs and I think that it did that really well. Most of our references were either French, European or American.
As a trans person, I was struck by the parallels between the late ‘80s and early 2020s. Many have compared the gay moral panic to the ways in which trans people are treated and talked about today. I’m interested to know how this might have factored into the film?
GO: Totally, I’m increasingly aware of the language that I read in the British media and how many parallels there are in terms of the way the trans community is spoken about in the news now and how similar the wording was. I went through every single newspaper that mentioned homosexuality over a span of about 10 years, with the film in the centre of that, and I copied them all into a document. This language is so powerful. It has the ability to shape public opinion and it was in our minds at the beginning to hopefully allude to these parallels and to allow people to work out for themselves how damaging this kind of systemic language is, and how deeply it cuts.
There were also other parallels in terms of the fact that there was something called ‘No Outsiders’ in Birmingham, teaching young people about the fact that queer people exist. It’s very, very basic but there were protests outside of schools and parents not wanting their children to go in because they didn’t want them to learn that gay people or queer people exist. That was happening the year I started writing the film, so it was always in the forefront of our minds. This might be a film about something in 1988, but it’s just as much about today.
The question I’ve been asked the most is, “How much do you think has changed?” and, unfortunately, I don’t believe all that much has changed and, as you say, the target may have shifted but the necessity to blame somebody or to victimise them in the press is still there. That kind of fearmongering is still there.
Specific details, like The Well of Loneliness being passed between members and the networks of mutual aid needed to keep everyone afloat, make the lesbian community feel very much lived in. You’ve already touched on the research that went into recreating it, but was there anything involved in the process that surprised you?
GO: Showing the community side of the film and the activism side was quite a difficult juggling act. I always wanted it to be a portrait of one woman interrogating her life and her choices, but I always wanted to leave the audience with hope. I didn’t want to completely ignore the fact that there had been this amazing movement that had happened in response to Section 28.
I did a lot of research about female housing co-ops and people who had been part of the queer community and there was a discussion very early on about if you choose to live the kind of life that Viv is living in the film, ultimately, in the ‘80s, the only option was to be kind of ghettoised and to be forced to live a certain way within a certain community, and whether or not that's a good or bad thing for the characters. Obviously, things have changed slightly, but we always wanted to get a sense of that confusion: it’s not all good and it’s not all bad.
I think there’s an assumption that if you choose to be one foot in the closet, one foot out the closet, like Jean, that’s not the right way to go because it’s not being your true, authentic self. At the same time, the women we spoke to who were living in co-ops had no contact with their families. They’d been completely cut off. Jean is ultimately trying to keep hold of all these different parts of her life in the way that those women couldn’t.
We were doing some research right up at the end, speaking to women who had lived this experience in the ‘80s or who had been part of the queer community and spoke to this TV presenter called Huffty. She was big in the ‘80s. We were chatting about these bars and she told us about the ‘bog fund’, we loved that anecdote and the fact that it was Newcastle-specific.
It may well have existed somewhere else, but it was Newcastle that she was speaking of and I thought it tied into this idea that activism comes in all shapes and sizes and financial activism may be, as I heard someone saying the other day, the least sexy form of it. But I thought it was an interesting way of showing that everybody is able to make a small change in their lives. It may not be this big, visible change, it may not be flying a flag, but it can still make a difference.
Blue Jean is out in UK cinemas on February 10. You can follow Fran here.