BLUE JEAN (B+) - Newcomer Rose McEwen digs deep for a moving performance as a closeted gym teacher in Maggie Thatcher's England during the reactionary crackdown on gay rights in the late 1980s. She plays Jean Newman, a cute, conflicted woman struggling to balance her work life and private life, unsure how to handle the consequences of living an authentic life.
She lives in a cramped apartment (where she mopes in front of the blandly hetero program "Blind Date" on the telly) and enjoys nights at the pub with her butch, out girlfriend Viv (Kerrie Hayes) and their circle of incestuous gal-pals. Things get complicated when a new student, Lois (Lucy Halliday), pops up at the same gay bar, and Jean feels her worlds colliding. At school, Lois is bullied by her straight classmates, led by alpha girl Siobhan (Lydia Page), and Jean feels helpless to stop it.
This is a debut feature from writer-director Georgia Oakley, who avoids cliches and takes time to flesh out these key characters. Jean reads as straight, so she "passes" well in social situations and with the other teachers and coaches (though she refuses to hit the pub with them after school). Oakley builds tension slowly and assuredly, and Jean's inner turmoil thrums to an anti-climax. That ending feels a little too pat and simplistic, but it doesn't undo the moving character study of an era that still feels haunting.
MADELEINE COLLINS (B-minus) - There may be times that you make it to the end of a challenging movie, and you managed to figure everything out finally, but if you had been in charge you would have put it together differently. This story of a woman impossibly juggling two separate families (in Paris and Geneva) is too often a chore to parse, top-heavy with mundane world-building and a rushed over-emotional ending.
Virginie Efira is Judith, a striving professional (she is a translator who often works remotely), married to a orchestra conductor and with two teen boys who seem to spend a lot of time at boarding school. Judith has concocted an elaborate ruse of weekly work trips but instead takes the train to Abdel (Quim Gutierrez) and their preschool daughter Ninon (a haunting Loise Benguerel), in a tense, fragile household in Switzerland. At first, Judith seems adept at alternating between these two existences. But her subterfuge slowly unravels.
Director Antoine Barraud (from a script he wrote with Helena Klotz) opens with a bit of mystery and misdirection. A woman shopping for a dress has a fainting spell and then an apparently fatal accident. Her connection to Judith is not entirely clear, though some might be quicker than I was to notice the parallels unfold and piece this together well before the halfway mark. If you don't do that, you might be frustrated by the leisurely pace of Barraud in connecting the dots and unmasking Judith's untenable ploy.
Efira is occasionally arresting but too often bland (in a Kim Cattrall way) as a woman who wants to have her cake and eat it too, all while testing the patience of a boss frustrated by her growing unreliability. The film barely earns the right to then race to a climax that eventually reveals Judith's full motivations and her sociopathic weaknesses. Judith seems to have more of an emotional connection with the shady character who supplies her with fake IDs than she does with her two partners; that's an interesting idea that is underdeveloped but well played in the final scene. I wish there was a better way to put this whole puzzle together. (With Jacqueline Bisset as Judith's judgmental mother.)
BONUS TRACK
At a house party, a cathartic punk dance moment features "Maggie, Maggie, Maggie, Out, Out, Out" by the Larks:
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