Disobedience

Early on in writer-director John Sayles’ quietly remarkable coming-out drama Lianna (1983), the titular main character’s husband, a haughty film professor appropriately named Dick (Jon DeVries), passive-aggressively reminds his students that the documentary genre isn’t as pure as they’d like to think. Though its offerings might better mimic reality than a staged and scripted work of fiction in an aesthetic and narrative sense, they aren’t that much different in how they reinforce their maker’s worldview. And in the editing room, the case remains for both a practical need to streamline a storyline, discarding details deemed, for various reasons, unusable. 

Played by a superb Linda Griffiths, Lianna herself is, when we first meet her, living a life where her husband has something akin to final cut, deciding what’s most important (usually his work) and what isn’t (the college lectures she attends at night to assuage the repetitive boredom of her imposed housewife routine). Lianna has been married to Dick for years, and they have a couple elementary-school-age kids eye-rollingly named after Theda Bara and Spencer Tracy. There’s never been a moment in her adult life when her needs and desires have been put first. She met Dick when she was a student, so it was decided that she’d drop out to get ahead of valid gossip about him taking advantage of teacher-student power dynamics. It was also decided when they got married that she wouldn’t work. Aside from Sandy (Jo Henderson), an older friend with whom she often takes classes, Lianna doesn’t have a social circle of her own.

Maggie Renzi and Linda Griffiths in Lianna.

Lianna and Dick’s marriage is already (or for a while has been) on the rocks at the beginning of the movie, compounded by Dick’s barely concealed infidelity and his hurtful dismissiveness of his wife’s attempts to pursue the education she was pressured to abandon in her youth. But it really comes crashing down not as much on account of what Dick does but because of something Lianna realizes about herself: that she’s a deeply repressed lesbian. The come-to-Jesus moment is induced by her having dinner, then doing more, with her gay (but still semi-closeted) psychology professor, Ruth (Jane Hallaren). 

The epiphany precipitates a certain freedom. Divorcing Dick is, in some ways, a relief — a means to finally think and do entirely for oneself, a way to unreservedly satiate rather than suppress one’s sexual needs, even if Lianna initially has no money of her own to ensure a satisfying amount of autonomy. But Lianna is realistic, particularly to the year in which it was released, about the hegemonically enforced drawbacks that come with its protagonist’s long-time-coming self-liberation. 

Parental separation is already hard on kids, but Lianna’s youngest becomes almost nonverbal, especially upset by other kids’ teasing about her mother’s identity. Having internalized straight society’s de facto homophobia, Sandy, once Lianna’s closest confidant, stops speaking to her, reflecting disgustedly on the times she and Lianna have changed clothes in front of each other or held hands to comfort one another. (At least she’ll eventually come back around, overcoming the wasteful futility of letting sexuality spoil a longtime friendship.) Guy friends who know about the separation but not the gayness only check in on Lianna to see if it’s possible to sleep with her after years of lusting from afar. Divorce courts generally side with a mother, but not when the mother is a lesbian. Even romance can’t save her: Lianna tells Ruth that she’s the only person she’s ever really loved, and though Ruth loves her too, she doesn’t love her enough to have Lianna move in during a time of need or give up the long-distance lover she has in another state.

Jane Hallaren and Linda Griffiths in Lianna.

The empathetic Lianna isn’t miserabilist, contorting itself into a depressing cautionary tale. Sayles’ compassionate writing and direction have more of a this-world-is-bullshit frame of mind. He’s not didactic about it, though; the blows to Lianna’s life are presented more as little cuts. A good amount of time is spent watching her in her one-bedroom apartment, alone, her eyes roiling with bewilderment. She’s happy to be out, closer to the person she was as a summer camp-attending teen crushing on an older female counselor. She’s also flummoxed at the price to pay for being herself — the alienation it brings.

Nothing about Lianna really rings false; the best example of Sayles’ aptitude for overheard-sounding dialogue comes when Lianna offhandedly comes out to a progressive neighbor (Maggie Renzi) in her new apartment building’s laundry room and proceeds to laugh hysterically at how solemn and deathly serious everything feels to her now. That’s not true, however, of its dependence on tone-upsettingly twee montages to clarify time’s passage. In a movie with a flair for nearly always saying what feels exactly right in the moment, they’re the sole moments smudged with we-get-it obviousness. But those short lapses in otherwise ahead-of-its-time good judgment are more than forgivable in a movie that ought to be far more consistently recognized as a pillar in lesbian representation in cinema.