Moonlit Winter

I often feel silly talking about queer—namely sapphic—cinema due to my own evident biases towards it. It’s back to the question of “is this film really this brilliant, or am I just a fag?” While art is (apparently) subjective—a point that I would argue against given that my taste exists—I cannot deny that I sometimes feel like one of those dudebro types praising every mediocre action flick.  Despite my melancholic and oftentimes depressive exterior, I don’t tend to personally connect to depictions of stereotypical depression, which makes sense given that my relationship towards…emotions is different than most. I nevertheless find myself irritated by this quirk of mine.  Ignoring my biases towards queer art, I think that it is Moonlit Winter’s depiction of the depressive which touched me the most. It’s so gentle, inviting even, in how the film presents the suppression of self and the mourning that comes with it. The artists understand that the text is ultimately one about love, constructing both the narrative as well as the images around love’s softness. The loss of love is thus contextualized around its transformative potential. The picture—idealistic in its pursuits for beauty—longs for love’s relief, never becoming drowned out by the world surrounding the frame. Even if the storybook ending is never shown to us, the aesthetic language is designed around the potential of that final image rather than the past’s attempts to kill it. “I dream of you too,” she confesses. The necessity of romanticism reveals itself.