Lesbian Films Stop Asking Permission Between 2019 and 2024

A lesbian romantic comedy no longer has to prove it deserves to exist.

Nina Pons plays Olivia, a fashion student from Italy spending a year in London who falls into something with her professor Catherine, played by TB Barnes. The film meanders, drags in pacing. Occasionally reads like dialogue run through translation software one too many times—and somewhere underneath all that, there is charm.

The Guardian's review acknowledges this charm but treats it as a failure to overcome the film's formal flaws. This assumption—that a lesbian romantic comedy should be evaluated using the same metric as any other romantic comedy, with tight plotting, efficient pacing. Narrative economy—was never stated but it was always there.

For decades, films with lesbian characters existed to justify their own existence. They carried the weight of representation and had to be either tragic or didactic—the alternative was ridicule. A film about two women falling in love could not afford to be frivolous. But between 2019 and 2024, something shifted.

They stopped proving anything and chose silliness deliberately—meandering is now a formal strategy, not a failure of craft. When a critic calls a film tedious, they are usually right about what they observed, but observation is not evaluation. The real question is whether tedium might not be a flaw at all—it might be the cost of the freedom the film is claiming.