As a general rule I stay away from 'advanced age' romances. I can remember what it was like to be a teenager, and naturally I know what it's like to be an early adult, but I can scarcely imagine what it must be like to be old. Not yet. And besides, what's more powerful than first love? What's more exciting than that tumultuous period of first discovery, right?
I discovered how wrong I was when I watched If These Walls Could Talk 2, HBO's lesbian romance TV anthology film. The first segment was about two older ladies who had spent nearly their entire lives together. It had me wanting to rip my heart out of my chest from the very first moment, first from joy, and then from utter despair when one partner dies and the other is left, without the protections inherent to marriage, to deal with the callous, uncaring in-laws who barely knew the deceased and could not care less about whatever bond the two may have shared.
It was breathtakingly ingenious one of the greatest and most heartbreaking things I've ever seen. So I immediately scrambled to find more advanced age romance movies and Hannah Free immediately popped up.
Hannah Free is billed as 'the lesbian Brokeback Mountain.' "An empty boast," I immediately told myself. Brokeback Mountain is a staggering achievement in film history, a flawless masterwork of sweeping bittersweet romance. Yet... to my unimaginable delight, Hannah Free may well be as good as Brokeback Mountain after all.
This film tells the story of a woman with the unlikely name of Hannah Free, whose wanderlust is as boundless as her last name entails. But the seasons in the sun are long gone, and now she fritters away in an old folks' home, confined to a hospital bed by injury. By her side always, is the one she loves... not physically, but incorporeal as a hallucination or ghost. It's dually heartwarming and heartbreaking to see her railing at a spirit who may not be there. The bond they share is so viscerally strong.
Hannah Free lacks the epic cinematography, the conceptual grandeur, the succinct directorial flourishes that allow Brokeback Mountain to blow minds and win awards. But the story it tells is every bit as good, if not better. The people and circumstances and dialogue it portrays are every bit as real, every bit as illuminatingly genuine. And this movie had me bawling as much as any movie I've ever seen.
That's certainly not to disparage Brokeback, one of my all-time favorite films. Brokeback Mountain plays with gender mores to lusciously paint an essential and enlightening point about the nature of love. Hannah Free never pushes the envelope, never strikes a chord intended to ring out in the annals of time. But the points it makes are subversive in their own way, and essential as well. It tells us that the Well of Loneliness is not the only end for one who "dares" to love one who is of their same gender. It tells that miracle love knows no gender bounds, and it tells us that love can transverse decades. The portrait it paints of elderly life is as shockingly unglamorous as Brokeback Mountain's tragic arc is shockingly glamorous (in cinematographic terms), and both visions have truth to them.
Admittedly. the soundtrack is generic. Like, I think they borrowed it from The Weather Channel. But in a way I don't mind, because the stark simplicity of the soundtrack sort of forces you to focus on the story. Lacking the powerful force of contemporary music makes the story seem a little more sincere. Despite the incredible melancholy of some of the content, it never feels contrived or maudlin because they're not using the typical tricks employed by the Oscar crowd.
What Hannah Free is, is pure unadulterated romance. It's the Annie On My Mind of films. Even though this and Annie have nothing remotely in common story-wise, they both hit the mark of perfect love. If you're looking for something accusatory, biting, tumultuous, this may not be the film for you. But if you're one who believes real love still exists, one who believes love is as pure and wide and unbreakable as a mountain, Hannah Free will resonate as deeply with you as it has with me.
