TMC Reviews: ‘A Marine Story’ the lesbian soldier film

by Kendal Mint Cake

‘A decorated marine officer unexpectedly returns home from the war and is quickly recruited to help a troubled teen prepare for boot camp, but when the true reasons for her return become known it threatens the future for both of them.’

Now this may say more about me than it does about lesbian cinema, but on reading the press release for ‘A Marine Story,’ I immediately rubbed my hands and prepared for a ‘Loving Annabelle’ style teacher/pupil lezathon.

I wasn’t complaining either- I like the older woman/coming-of-age-teen power dynamic. There is a place for films like this; hot (yeah usually straight) actresses making out in fraught situations – suffocating all-girl boarding schools, just before one of them gets married to a man, the stressy nightmare Hollywood of ‘Mulholland Drive’. And these kinds of films are enjoyable on some level. I read somewhere that women find sex scenes in a dramatic context a lot hotter than just straightforward porn off RedTube, but I wouldn’t say that these eroticised scenarios were particularly well crafted or do justice to the realities of lesbian life.

So I settled in to watch ‘A Marine Story’ expecting a whole load of hot and sweaty training with some sexualised power dynamics: shot after shot of lezzies hosing each other down under the Californian sun, waiting for it to set so they could jump in the sack, alternately loving it and being wracked with guilt about what they were doing because lesbians love inner conflict, especially inner conflict about sex.  I was wrong. There is some hot and sweaty training and hosing, but things don’t unravel just as you’d expect – and for that tweak to conventions I give the filmmakers credit.

In A Marine Story, we are presented with the story of honourably discharged and deeply patriotic Alex, returning home from the military as the latest victim of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. She immediately comes into contact with Saffron, a 20 year old shoplifter who is something of a local menace and, according to the kindly local police man – the only way to save her from jail is for her to  join the army. Community service has apparently gone out the window in the state of California, but I tried not to get too distracted by the oddness of the Californian justice system. Alex, as a hard-assed ex marine is given the job of introducing some discipline into Saffron’s life. Cue multiple sequences of Saffron acting out (the actress, Paris Pickard, chooses to portray this by shouting all her lines for the first quarter of the film, but her performance does improve steadily as the plot develops) and Alex drilling some serious discipline into her until she begins to submit.

For me the dramatic force of the film lay in how Alex just wants to do her job and serve her country. It’s a scenario backed up by research on the part of the film-makers who found that many ex-servicemen and women dismissed under Don’t Ask Don’t Tell don’t resent the military at all: they just want to keep doing what they’ve been trained to do. We’ve seen this before, dear readers, in the plotline involving Tasha from The L Word. But at least there was some internal conflict written into that character. Alex is quite one dimensional in comparison. She needs to find ways to satiate that relentless patriotic urge (through a touch of vigilante police work and drilling Saffron into shape) whilst trying to fit back into civilian life. She doesn’t seem to feel let down by the US army, and despite scene after scene of her boozing up the town, we aren’t given much of an insight into how she actually feels. The pointless, detrimental nature of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell is well known, but ‘A Marine Story’ chooses to portray how gay military personnel don’t challenge it, instead, Alex tries to live around the law to the detriment of her personal life. No one tries to overrule it, and even the commander in chief who dismisses Alex openly admits that the politics of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell go much deeper than the guise of ‘protecting morale, good order, discipline and unit coherence.’ The film makes this point clear; everyone is trying to work around a law that helps and protects no one.

I did walk away having reflected more deeply on the impact of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, but whether director Ned Farr pulled off a great film is another question. Did this 93mins lezzie military drama do a better job at telling the DADT story than some of the recent press on the topic? One gripe I had with the film’s structure was that it descends into narrative chaos for no good reason at all. Take the bogus grudge that threatens to sink Alex’s career forever- the motive just doesn’t hold up, it isn’t believable- and it’s an important part of the story. The sudden introduction of the ‘war on drugs’ in the last 15 minutes of the film was a weird shift of focus. Are druggies not gays America’s real problem?  We lezzies- we’re patriotic, we hate anything the government considers illegal and we all look super feminine even when we’re super tough, zero tolerance commandos. (Even Demi Moore took a bullet and shaved her head for G.I Jane). Just let us serve our country! To me – this focus on God Bless America weakened what could be quite a compelling drama. That, with a heavy dose of feel good, ‘if life hands you a lemon’ jingly music on top, leaves a sickly sweet taste.

So give it a watch if hot femmes working out all summer in the sweltering Californian countryside is your thing.  But if you like your politics probed, and your drama served raw, pass on this.

‘A Marine Story’ is available on DVD from 11th April 2011, and is being distributed by Peccadillo Pictures. You can also catch it at the 25th London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival on Tues 5th April, and Wed 6th April 2011.

Film Website

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