There’s some soap-operatic gusto to this story of two teenage gay women in a Jehovah’s Witness community in Quebec; it’s got something of Jeanette Winterson’s tenderness, if not exactly the wit, and the movie is interesting and even faintly subversive in its implied analogies concerning conversion and enclosed behaviour systems.
Anwen O’Driscoll brings some Anna Kendrick energy to the role of Jaime, a smart teen whose mum suffers a breakdown after the death of her dad from a heart attack. She has been sent away to live with her aunt Beth (Liane Balaban), who with her husband Jean-François (Antoine Yared), is a devout Jehovah’s Witness and expects Jaime to obey their rules and show up to their religious services wearing the very uncool Handmaid’s-Tale dress they’ve picked out for her. Gloweringly, Jaime complies but is struck as by a lightning-bolt at the sight of beautiful Marike (June Laporte) in the congregation; she lives with her older sister Amanda (Deragh Campbell) and Amanda’s alpha-male husband Frank (Tim Campbell), fierce JW folk, all.
Marike is wounded by the fact that her mother was shunned, or “disfellowshipped”, by the believers who now encourage her to believe that her mother is dead; this is a painful echo of Jaime’s own bereavement. Soon, Jaime and Marike are hanging out together all the time, going to meetings, going door-to-door with leaflets, and kissing in the toilets of the cinema during a speciously heterosexual double-date with two lunkheaded JW boys. There is a wildly romantic “baptism” scene in the bath where the erotic excitement is elided with religious enthusiasm.
But the film upends expectations to some degree: it isn’t simply about oppressive belief clamping down on gay people. As a Jehovah’s Witness in a secular world, Marike is accustomed to living a semi-secret life and used to persistently trying to convert people – not that Jaime needs to be converted in the emotional sense. I was reminded a little of Apostasy by the British film-maker Daniel Kokotajlo, in which the emotional stakes were a little higher. A sympathetic, fervent drama nonetheless.
• You Can Live Forever is released on 16 June in UK cinemas and digital platforms.
