Georgia Oakley’s Blue Jean takes place in a coastal town in Britain, a place with its own unique beauty. It may not be, back in the late 1980s, a place that’s welcoming to members of the 2LGBT+ community. One of those people includes the titular character, Jean Newman (Rosie McEwen), a lesbian teaching PE in a high school. Her job is precarious enough with her sexual identity.

Jean’s life gets more precarious as she discovers that Lois (Lucy Halliday), a new student, occasionally sneaks into the bars she frequents and starts hanging out with her friends. Both have people in their lives who aren’t helpful in their situations. Jean has Viv (Kerrie Hayes), her more out girlfriend. Meanwhile, Lois is the receiving end of bullying from one of her classmates Siobhan (Lydia Page).

Gay rights is precarious now but as a reminder, Blue Jean takes its viewers back to a worse time, a time when gay people need allies the most, especially within the community. Maybe it’s reductive to call ‘Viv’ as someone not helping Jean’s situation. It’s easy for us to relegate both characters within archetypes.

Jean is the one with half a foot outside the closet while Viv is the one ‘forcing’ her out. Thankfully, repeat viewings give their conflict more dimension. This film is coming out at a time when most queer viewers would be on Viv’s side. Oakley is also doing her part in showing these characters’ dimensions.

Jean, being the lead character, makes for a compelling psychological character study. In one of the scenes, a fellow teacher shows something that an anonymous person put on Jean’s mailbox that hints to her sexuality, and Lois is the first person she suspects of ‘blackmailing’ her. In fairness to Jean, it’s easy to think like this in Thatcher-era Britain.

Even if Blue Jean has three main characters, it keeps making me return to the idea, or the film’s idea, of the gay community. That community is present here in other scenes, but its focus on these three characters show how alienated they are towards one another. Jean sees some within her community as enemies instead of allies.

In directing and writing Blue Jean, Oakley transports us to the testy time where her characters live. The film’s grainy cinematography takes its viewers back to the 80s without making it look like a pretentious Instagram filter. The same balance shows up within the film’s ‘minor’ technical aspects, where event he hair design is authentic.

Back to the film’s bigger aspects, dramatic moments feel spontaneous here. Jean can be crying her eyes out and the film finds comic dimensions to those scenes without interrupting its balance. This story is relatable to me for obvious reasons but what I wrote above is enough to make it universal. I’m glad to discover one of last year’s obscure festival gems and I hope more viewers do too.

Watch Blue Jean in select Canadian theatres.