‘I saw her one last time. She didn’t see me.’ On queer gazes and gender representation in cinema

This piece was written in response to a prompt, chosen by the Cambridge University Film Association: 'Coming of Age'.

When I reflect on growing up queer, though it may sound laughable, I find that Luca Guadanigno’s Call Me By Your Name (2017) feels almost intertwined with my own coming out. An A24 film from the studio’s earlier days that centres gay love, nostalgia and dissatisfaction, the romantic drama has now been absorbed as a cult classic into the queer canon, retaining an air of privacy for its arthouse production. A story that appears niche has proven itself to be rather universal in its depiction of queer coming of age and the bittersweet memories of young love, and yet in my search for a lesbian equivalent, hoping to get even closer to that elusive ‘true’ representation, I have found myself disappointed.

GLAAD’s 2023-24 survey of ‘Where We Are on TV’ reported 35.7% of LGBTQ characters on screen to be gay men, compared to just 25.2% who were lesbians – not a huge disparity, but a telling one for visual media. Far too often, the ‘gay character’ is assigned automatically male (and white) under the false presupposition that this is the most universal depiction possible; gendered standards of otherness infect the queer community just as they have heterosexual dynamics in life and on screen, and the lesbian is relegated to an intersectional, ‘niche’ identity which often serves merely as a dramatic vehicle. This creates the issue of representation that I find most frustrating, which is the limited series of narrow boxes queer female characters are allowed to occupy in film: drawn-out longing, ‘turning’ straight women or replicating heteronormative dynamics, to name the few that I am most familiar with.

Where Call Me By Your Name breaks the mould of acceptability by centring a complex, imperfect romance which is daring in its explicitness, in its exploration of doubt and lust as symbiotic, and yet also radically views (historical) queerness as compatible with community, lesbian media has not yet provided me with such a complete depiction of queer love which resonates with my own experiences. Many sapphic films represent parts of such a journey and identity, but the deeply embedded issues of depicting women in film almost always prevent totality. Even in two of my favourite examples, Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019) and Carol(2015), the female characters are restricted. In the latter, they are often denied complexity, ambiguity or sexuality which is truly separate from men, whilst the film fails to negotiate social barriers in a meaningful way. And in Céline Sciamma’s masterpiece, whilst it comes closer to the mark than any other sapphic film for me, the dual cinematic gaze which I will discuss in depth later serves to trap the protagonists in a bubble of queerness which proves, ultimately, to be incompatible with their existence within society.

After reading André Aciman’s original novel, Call Me By Your Name, my biggest takeaway was the radical shamelessness of his writing, which Guadaningo was able to masterfully translate to the screen; his unique directorial style combines a precise vision with a core belief in casting as the key to success, and in his actors embodying their characters so as to portray expansive, naturalistic people. He encouraged Armie Hammer and TimotheéChalamet to ‘roll around’ together in the grass in their only, brief rehearsal, and the two actors recount gleefully the ease this brought to their performances. I suspect it is for this very reason that, despite both actors being straight, their characters are utterly believable in their reality, seeming to exist between and beyond the moments ‘captured’ on screen. Just as the novel is a jumbled collection of memories from a summer conjured fondly in Elio’s mind some decades later, the film is able to evoke both the ephemerality of adolescence and the permanence of its self-discoveries through Guadanigno’s creative process, and in doing so, becomes a living museum to which I can return again and again, as if revisiting my own past.

Where Call Me By Your Name does this so well is in its evocation of ambiguity, and in its confidence depicting the gaps of memory and the fissures that inevitably exist between people. Elio and Oliver, whilst eventually lovers, establish a relationship at first of distaste for one another; Elio appears jealous of Oliver’s suave American confidence, resenting of his popularity and cautious of allowing him into the house and family. Oliver, on the other hand, seems at once enthusiastic and distant, warm and unyielding, interesting but uninterested. After Elio’s attempts to impress him through knowledge and musical talent fall somewhat flat and the two share a decidedly unsatisfying kiss, they assume a dynamic of frustrated silence that buzzes with--something. We know from Elio that his something is lust, desire and regret, but the one-sided cinematic gaze of memory bars us from discovering Oliver’s, and frames queer longing not just as unrealised, unconventional desire, but also as imbued with the high stakes of emotional extremes. The emotional landscape Guadanigno paints is one where love and hate are separated by a hair. Queer love, whilst it unites and relieves, is not allowed to overcome the difference of person, and both men retain the privacy of their thoughts, and the complexity of their internal dissonance, even in moments of bliss. In their final scene alone together, an out of focus Oliver looks down wistfully at a sleeping Elio, his blurry face pained with--again, something. Whether grief, regret or anticipation of their encroaching goodbye, it matters not. What Call Me By Your Name asserts is that its male characters are able to maintain their own complexities and uncertainties--the privacy of their minds--whilst their romantic relationship offers an expansive queer vulnerability.

As I compare Guadanigno’s film to Portrait of a Lady on Fire and Carol, I want to focus on the idea of a dual cinematic gaze which I will call the lesbian gaze. Instead of siding with one character, sapphic films may appropriate the perspective of both protagonists at different times to confirm the female origin and recipient of such intense longing, both denying the intrusion of a male gaze from the external spectator and attempting to protect the queer sexuality within from objectification.^[1] In their effects, however, where Call Me By Your Name is ambiguous and dissonant in its single lens, these sapphic romances are subtle and self-contained; their self-protection comes at the expense of demanding choices of sacrifice which ultimately limit their female characters’ complexity and the wider implications of their stories. As Guadanigno describes the didactic message of his film, he states ‘you can build a bridge to go and meet new people instead of confining yourself within your own boundaries.’ His vision of queerness is indeed a broader queering of society and culture through the microcosm of a single romance, whilst the necessary privacy of sapphic equivalents is unable to resist both the male gaze of cinema and the external pressures of society for women, and must choose.

To first return to the shameless explicitness which initially shocked and impressed me about Call Me By Your Name, I find the similarly explicit depictions of lesbian sexuality in Portrait of a Lady on Fire to be crucially less complex for their framing within the film’s narrative. Especially in explicit moments, the one-sided gaze of Guadanigno’s film depicts the personal anxiety and guilt around queer desire, whilst Sciamma’s celebrates a shared queerness (strangeness) of sex and sexuality which seeks only to satisfy the lesbian gaze. Both focus on moments of unconventional sexuality, in a queering of cinema and representation which undermines the ‘suitability’ of such representations: Elio steals Oliver’s used swimming trunks from the bathroom and smells them deeply, before masturbating; in Aciman’s book, he goes even further, revelling in the physical closeness of placing one of Oliver’s pubic hairs between his teeth. In Portrait of a Lady on Fire, a close up of Héloïse’s armpit as she applies a drug-like plant focuses on the movement of her fingers, framed by sighs of female pleasure that imitate the sex they have just had and will perhaps return to.

Yet, whilst both shamelessly portray a less manicured and more visceral idea of lust, Call Me By Your Name’s singular cinematic alignment with Elio focuses on the secrecy--and self-perceived perversion--of such an act. When Oliver later joins him in such ‘deviance’ in the famous ‘peach scene’, not judging but showing his own, reciprocal queer attraction, the moment therefore becomes infused with a deeper, personal relief. The loneliness of unadmitted, unrealised queerness has transformed into a normalisation of such desires, and with it, a rejection of an internalised view of queer identity as perverse, strange or unnatural. Sciamma masterfully redefines what can be sexy and chooses unexamined moments of physicality to reject objectification, but the moral acceptability of lesbian desire is never questioned, and thus its realisation is powerful emotionally, but does not seek to undermine wider structures of self-censorship and shame. Whilst I do not believe that every queer film should include shame as one of its emotional avenues, in the context of queer coming of age, I find such an exploration crucial to the effectiveness of Call Me By Your Name, and the lack thereof clear foreshadowing for the distinction between privately celebrated queerness and patriarchal societal existence in Portrait of a Lady on Fire.

I am sometimes tempted to put my affinity for Call Me By Your Name down to its distinct, gendered difference from me, and the productively partial representation this provides for queer female viewers. In viewing a male romance, I find I am able to reflect on an abstract ‘essence’ of queerness in the elements that continue to resonate with me despite the gender identity of the characters: the turmoil and shame, lust and confusion, relief and excitement which come from indulging in sexual and romantic experiences once thought impossible. And yet, I do not see the same crossing of gender territories in the opposite direction; queer men are not looking to lesbian media for their own abstracted representation or guidance. Whilst, of course, the primary explanation for this is the falsely perceived universality of the gay male experience as synonymous with queerness, the restrictions on female representation in film also limit the emotional complexity of sapphic media, and with this, the scope of its audience.

The primary sex scene in Carol illustrates the difficulty of presenting lesbian sexuality in an explicit way which does not also serve to fulfill the male gaze. The twisted, naked female form which writhes in pleasure and low-lit moans of bliss are a source of narrative and emotional satisfaction for the lesbian spectator, but cannot escape the simultaneous visual pleasure allowed for the hypothetical male viewer. Whilst Portrait of a Lady on Fire and Call Me By Your Name actively queer representations of sex, Carol comes too close to a lesbian gloss on heteronormative cinema. Their physical sex is filmed in a seductive overhead shot, outside of either woman’s established gaze, and appears more reminiscent of pornographic explicitness than the emotional sensuality and vulnerability of its more unconventionally framed counterparts. In offering what is an important, mainstream depiction of queer love, the film is forced to conform to troubling Hollywood norms which restrict women from explicit sexuality and narrative choice outside of patriarchal structures, and thus inherently limits the strength of its queerness as a subversive force.

As we examine the endings of all three films, which are very similar in visual terms, the depth of this challenge for sapphic filmmaking becomes ever more apparent. In Carol, the film’s primary tension between the titular character’s broken but enduring heterosexual marriage, her role as a mother and her personal desires to be with the woman she adores are eventually resolved, simply through the strength of their love for one another. As the two women’s gaze meets across a busy restaurant, both looking straight into the camera, the slow motion and gradual zoom-in of the shots queer both time and space and offer one, classic conclusion: love conquers all. Whilst it is refreshing to see a queer romance with a happy ending--something lesbian media so often denies--it also feels somewhat hasty, and guilty of what Adorno’s famous essay on culture and capitalism critiques.^[2] We have spent two long hours toying with the societal barriers to such a relationship flourishing in its social, economic and class context, only to leave the experience feeling emotionally satisfied, yet without overturning the system at play. Had Cate Blanchett’s character not been so wealthy, perhaps the film’s resolution would have been outright impossible, but regardless of this, the issue I take with such an ending is the political complacency it inspires in the viewer, whilst confirming the Hollywood doctrine that a woman satisfied romantically is a woman satisfied. Queer or otherwise, love--rather than the freedom to love--remains the goal.

Call Me By Your Name and Portrait of a Lady on Fire are incredibly similar in their final shots, aside from one key difference: Elio meets our gaze, whilst Héloïse refuses it. Having received news of Oliver’s engagement, a distraught Elio weeps by the fireplace as Visions of Gideon plays: a moving performance of silent complexity. Finally, as if to meet his own gaze and ‘close’ the memory we have been allowed to view, he breaks the fourth wall with a half smile, and the film ends. Meanwhile, as Marianne’s final line, ‘I saw her one last time, but she didn’t see me’ foretells, Héloïse’s own show of silent tears, laughter and defiance are now entirely private. Whilst Elio, in his final shot, gives up the one-sided gaze he has maintained thus far, Héloïse now rejects the reciprocity of the lesbian gaze, as if forced to condemn this queer chapter of her life to a distant past. Now a wife and mother, she must move on, whilst Marianne is only able to continue indulging her own queerness (difference) by existing on the fringes of society, a poor, female painter alone in a man’s world. Guadanigno’s gay, male protagonist is allowed to retain his dissonant emotions, and to find both satisfaction and dissatisfaction in his queer coming of age, whilst the sapphic protagonist is forced to choose, or deny society altogether. Marianne’s bitter grief embodies a private tragedy of lost, impossible love, whilst Elio’s distinctly bittersweet memory celebrates the joy of queerness alongside the pain of a short-lived, intense romance as a mould for a more universal tragedy. Rather than to come out, to ‘stray’ from the norm, in one’s rejection of internalised thoughts and behaviours, Call Me By Your Name proves it is possible to return, to come back, to a personal authenticity at once previously unknown and seemingly destined.

Whilst the personal nostalgia of Call Me By Your Name has firmly cemented itself as my own queer coming of age film, as I rewatched a range of sapphic films in preparation for this essay, I found myself enjoying their representation in a newly profound way. Within and without the cinematic world, I have been endeavouring to investigate and reevaluate the media I consume in an effort to decentre men from my life where beneficial. Queer feminism demands a personal standard of culture to be maintained by individuals which refuses the overly male, heterosexual, white and Western canon of mainstream literature; whilst I do not seek to displace such works from my own life and consumption, in my active search for more alternative media (often in the form of sapphic productions), I have felt my personal taste evolve. I maintain that yearning is simply not the nucleus of my queerness as a gay woman, yet the personal resonance of subtlety, slow-burn desire and unconventional explicitness have undeniably become more powerful for me as a spectator--so much so that the rewatch value of Portrait of a Lady on Fire, a film I once thought too slow-paced to sit through at all, now rivals that of Call Me By Your Name.

Guadanigno’s 2017 film still retains its unique complexity for me, however, even with age and this newfound perspective. Historically constructed restraints on women’s sexuality, queer or otherwise, and the formally embedded tendencies of film to cater to men, make true lesbian representation a seemingly Herculean task. Meanwhile, queer male narratives areable to undermine traditional depictions of masculinity as well as challenge social norms at large through the window of gay romance, and in doing so, offer a parallel viewing pleasure for sapphic spectators. When Guadanigno describes his film, he speaks of otherness, not queerness: ‘this is a movie about a family, compassion, transmission of knowledge, of being better people because someone’s otherness changes you.’ Gay, male media is allowed to be expansive, whilst I find that the female characters of Portrait of a Lady on Fire and Carolsuffer the entrapment of their self-contained lesbian gaze, perpetually forced to choose between competing external limitations. Lesbian sexuality is safe and valid within its bubble, which is beautiful in itself, whilst the transformative power of queerness for connection and community that Guadanigno advocates for feels actively revolutionary as a coming of age film. As we wait for the film industry to provide more daring, dissonant explorations of sapphic identity, male queerness on screen can provide crucial (partial) representation. And as increasingly radical sapphic gems get closer to a total depiction of lesbian sexuality, the future of cinematic representation remains hopeful for today’s young gay women.

^[1] See Laura Mulvey’s Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema

^[2] Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer discuss the relationship between the modern worker with leisure time and the manufactured culture they consume in ‘The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception’, a chapter of their book, Dialectic of enlightenment. In short, the essay states that Hollywood cinema creates emotionally fulfilling storylines with the goal of satisfying the proletariat spectator, who may otherwise, in their real life dissatisfaction, be tempted towards revolution against an exploitative capitalist system

By Bryony Clarke for CRoB Digital, in collaboration with Cambridge University Film Association, edited by Sydney Motl

Artwork by Lucia Billing