Jean (Rosy McEwen) bleaches her gamine crop of hair in the bathroom while on the TV downstairs Blind Date plays out, host Cilla Black chortling her way through the smirky innuendo that passes for light entertainment. Jean smiles along with the studio audience laughter; it doesn’t occur to her to question the baked-in misogyny of the programme format. Not yet, at least.
Jean is a woman caught in an uncomfortable limbo between two worlds. She’s a newly minted lesbian, on the fringes of a community of louder, prouder dykes, and in the first flush of romance with Viv (Kerrie Hayes). She’s also a PE teacher in a north-east England secondary school in the late 1980s; exactly the kind of person who the Thatcher regime’s recently enacted section 28 law – forbidding the “promotion of homosexuality” by local authorities – has in its crosshairs. For Jean – and McEwen’s performance is an intricate miracle of minute details and nervy flickers of alarm – the separation of work and life is an essential, but increasingly precarious, balance. That balance, to the frustration of Viv, who senses Jean’s reticence when it comes to fully embracing her sexual identity, is upended when one of her students, Lois (Lucy Halliday), encroaches on Jean’s closely guarded world.
A supremely accomplished debut feature from writer-director Georgia Oakley, Blue Jean captures a specific moment in British history with almost uncanny accuracy. The graininess of the photography, the well-chosen soundtrack of punchy 1980s electro-socialist pop anthems, the way that Jean’s costumes subtly shift as she crosses between the straight world and the gay one: it’s as persuasive as it is powerful.
