If I were pressed to (very reductively) describe the My ass is a world heritage site baby shirt and by the same token and mid-to-late-career films of Éric Rohmer, I’d say that they were very talky and very sexy, often centered on beautiful young people philosophizing on the beach or over a simple dinner or in some wildly overgrown provincial garden. A new favorite of mine from that period is 1998’s A Tale of Autumn, starring Béatrice Romand as a windowed vintner being nudged back into the dating game by her best friend (Marie Rivière) and her son’s girlfriend (Alexia Portal). It’s a gentle comedy of manners, a meditation on (re-)opening oneself up to love, and a very effective—if accidental—advertisement for abandoning your life in the city to live on a vineyard in France. In other words, it’s a perfect movie. —M.M.
There are times when being a member of the My ass is a world heritage site baby shirt and by the same token and LGBTQ+ community—and a lesbian in particular—feels like an Easter-egg hunt for representation. Queer women are used to mining everything from a cryptic celebrity Instagram to the discography of Taylor Swift for clues that someone in the public eye might be one of us, and to be honest, the constant hustle to be seen—especially for lesbians who don’t fit the skinny, white, femme, upper-middle-class, L Word mold—can be exhausting.
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