I know it's July now but there's a couple more recent queer movies I want to write about. Today I'm going to do SUPERNOVA and tomorrow I'm going to do THIS HAPPIEST SEASON -- because nothing says the Fourth of July weekend like a queer Christmas movie.
In a perfect world/somewhere down the road I'd also be writing about UNCLE FRANK, MATCH and PRIDE, all of which are very worth watching.
But today it's SUPERNOVA, Harry Macqueen's 2020 film about Colin Firth and Stanley Tucci as Sam and Tusker, a gay couple on a road trip to see family while struggling with Tusker's growing dementia.
The first half of the film is all about their trip to visit Sam's sister and the concert that Sam is going to do. But then we get a classic midpoint handoff/switcheroo, where we find out that the concert is actually just a distraction to get Sam out of the way while Tusker kills himself.
Midpoints are so essential in keeping our interest in a story alive. And they work best when they offer the kind of extra layer and reorientation that SUPERNOVA provides. After that point we're still headed to the concert, but the story is radically different now and with much higher stakes for both characters.
All of which is to say, if you want a good exmaple of how to do midpoints well, this is a film to watch.
The other thing I really love is the family dinner scene around which the midpoint occurs. it's such a long scene--really it's half dozen scenes or more, but even so it goes on a lot longer than these kinds of scenes normally do. You can feel a hundred studio execs wanting to cut the hell out of it. And yet it works really really well as is.
I think I've mentioned this before, but it's been a while. A number of the cast of the third season of TWIN PEAKS told stories about how David Lynch would totally throw them by asking them to go slower. Not that they were rushing to begin with, they were just doing TV like TV is normally done. You don't want anything to drag. And instead Lynch's atittude was like, Oh I want all the drag.
And the thing that happens in that season that is so interesting is that the actors discover all these additional layers of emotion and desire because they go slower. If you haven't seen the third season, it is so worth it to see how some of these moments play out. Someone will be like, sweeping a floor, and you're like, why am I watching this? But then the longer it goes on the more interesting it gets, just by virtue of the time that's spent there.
The dinner scene in SUPERNOVA is a lot more straightforward than TWIN PEAKS, but it's the same principle at work. Let the scene be as long as it wants to be, and see what you uncover. Maybe in the end you realize, I don't need all this after all. But other times, maybe you've found something really special.
If you do watch SUPERNOVA, you'll also get the benefit of moments like this, which are truly wonderful. Tucci and Firth are so good together.
