The enduring tensions between young LGBTQ lives and religious dogma have powered many movies, including the recent conversion-therapy horrors Boy Erased and The Miseducation of Cameron Post.
This gentle Canadian story of queer puppy love delicately pitches these ideologies against one another, without anything like the explicit encounters of Disobedience or the rapey heresy of Benedetta.
Set in 1990s Quebec, You Can Live Forever concerns Jaime (Anwen O’Driscoll), a grungy teenager who has recently lost her father. To help her grieving mother, Jamie is packed off to the remote community where her Aunt Beth (Liane Balaban), a devout Jehovah’s Witness, lives and where Jamie is expected to attend religious “meetings”.
It’s not so bad. The teen is rebellious enough to listen to Siouxsie and the Banshees and smoke joints with her new school chum, Nathan (Hasani Freeman). But she is also respectful enough to go along with her aunt’s beliefs, even when those beliefs demand that she wear a hideous floral dress.
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At the service, she immediately attracts the attention of Marike (June Laporte), the minister’s daughter, and the pair become firm friends – and, soon, something more than friends. Beautifully captured by the cinematographer Gayle Ye, their stolen kisses and side glances feel both intense and poignantly innocent. A lively score by the Canadian artist CFCF amplifies youthful enthusiasm over star-crossed romance.
Recent cinematic representations of Jehovah’s Witnesses, notably in Dea Kulumbegashvili’s Beginning, Richard Eyre’s The Children Act and Daniel Kokotajlo’s Apostasy, have not been kind to the Christian denomination. This compassionate story of puppy love – co-written and codirected by the former Witness Sarah Watts – shows more understanding towards the community, through conversations.
As Jaime and Marike study the Bible and go door to door with brochures, it becomes clear – long before the elders intervene with a surprising lack of force – that each has very different ideas of how their relationship will work.
The great Deragh Campbell, playing Marike’s sister, steals every scene she’s in.
You Can Live Forever is available on Curzon Home Cinema
