Cloudburst movie movie#

My mother, a one-time conservative radicalized by age and isolation, told me frequently toward the end of her life, “When you get old, nobody wants to touch you.” Even her doctor, she said, did not examine her, just sat in a chair across from her, calling her “young lady” and dismissing her complaints with, “Well,you’re not twenty anymore, heh, heh.”īut back to Cloudburst. There is virtually no documentation of the sensual softness of aging skin, the incredible tenderness of a wrinkled face held between your palms. By the way, another image you never see is that of old people touching, kissing. And for a good long time there at the beginning, Cloudburst does not disappoint-Olympia Dukakis is satisfyingly salty and butchily beautiful Brenda Fricker is innocent, sharp, and sarcastic their relationship hits just that blend of sweet and testy that convinces you that these two have loved each other for a long time.

Cloudburst movie movie#

So how, really, could I miss a movie about old lesbians, if only for the family-reunion party atmosphere in the audience-filled, of course, with old lesbians. I once saw an entire episode of Roseanne, a revolutionary sitcom I otherwise respected, based on the premise that naked old people are disgusting. Images of age seem to always be accompanied by pathos or ridicule. Old people in general are rarely seen in central roles, though they do show up in the occasional patronizing comedy. Of all the various categories of people you never see in the media, old lesbians have to be up there in the top two or three. I saw Cloudburst at the Seattle International Film Festival, feeling compelled to go to a lot of trouble and expense to get there by the simple ecstatic fact that Olympia Dukakis was playing an old lesbian. This absolute starvation for images of ourselves in the public arena is why films like Thom Fitzgerald’s Cloudburst become so important-why we rush to see them, and why we love or hate them-or, in the case of myself and Cloudburst, a little of both. People of color, women, and queers have all discovered this-if we don’t see images of ourselves among the millions of images we are bombarded with daily, it becomes hard even for us to really believe we exist. On top of those things, one of the most isolating things that can happen to us, as a disenfranchised group living within an oblivious mainstream, is that we never see ourselves reflected in the cultural media.

Staying home sounds better and better, even though we sometimes feel that we’re missing everything. There are physical reasons-we can’t drive at night to get to events we can’t hear and people get irritated by having to repeat everything so we’re left out of conversations we’re just plain too tired to go out, even to events that might energize us.

There are emotional reasons-the changes we are going through as we age feel deeply personal and hard to communicate. It’s easy to feel like we’re all alone on this long exploratory trek we call old age.