I Love You, Beksman

Dali (Christian Bables) is a slender young thing with flamingo pink hair who wears loud shirts, speaks using the upper part of his vocal range and swings his hips when he walks. He’s a fashion designer and make-up artist who lives as part of a big queer family with a doting house mother who refers to him as anakshie (‘daughter’). Imagine their surprise when he comes out – as straight.

A lively comedy from writer-director team Fatrick Tabada and Perci M Intalan, who previously worked together on 2019’s Born Beautiful, this is in one part a sidelong take on the experience of a more conventional coming out, and another part celebration of the options out there beyond conventional straight masculinity. Although it touches on some dark subjects, including the way that masculinity is often reinforced through violence, it’s ultimately a joyous, life-affirming film. Neither its silliness nor its occasionally barbed wit can distract from the fact that it has a lot of heart.

The reason for Dali’s sudden confession is a heart-stopping big Hollywood-style instance of love at first sight, played with enough oomph to win over viewers regardless of their sexuality. It needs to, because the film’s biggest weakness is its underdeveloped love interest. Iana Bernardez is engaging and sweet as beauty queen Angel, but she doesn’t have much to do, with only a couple of scenes in which she really gets to assert herself. With a lot of characters, the film has to rely on charismatic performances to make them stand out where necessary. Bables has the vivaciousness to carry it off, along with a gift for physical comedy. Angel’s brothers, by contrast, are characterised by their camply macho moustaches, which is not so much of a problem because we only really encounter them as a team, there to teach the hero how to be more manly.

Manliness is, of course, not for everyone. When Dali changes his hair and starts working out, it doesn’t really suit him, and it’s pretty clear that he’s losing his way. His family, meanwhile, struggles to accept him in a way that many queer kids will find familiar. Cautionary remarks sound more bitchy than intended and relationships beyond the central, romantic one are at risk.

An interesting choice for the 2023 Queer East film festival, I Love You, Beksman (the last word there roughly cognate with ‘pansy’) explores an area of the LGBTQ+ spectrum which is often neglected, championing a freedom of gender expression often denied to straight people who do not explicitly identify as non-binary or trans. At its heart it’s classic Hollywood stuff – true love and the importance of being true to oneself, painted in bright colours and culminating in a big musical number – but these are the sort of characters too long left out of that celluloid fairy tale. It’s their turn to shine.