Euros Lyn | Heartstopper: Girls / 2022 [Season 1, Episode 6]

everything’s changed

by Douglas Messerli

 

Alice Oseman (screenplay), Euros Lyn (director) Heartstopper: Girls / 2022 [Season 1, Episode 6] [30 minutes]

 

Hardly five minutes in to Episode 6 of Heartstopper we have already discovered that Nick (Kit Conner) is exploring whether or not he might be bisexual and Elle (Yasmin Finney), the trans woman of the series, is confessing to her new lesbian friends Tara and Darcy that she is in love with Tao (William Gao). And Tara is beginning to have problems since she has now been fully outed as a lesbian. Let’s talk about sexual and gender confusion.

      And that is precisely what this segment of the award-winning series does. 

      Nick asks the vital question to all coming out movies, how did Charlie know he was gay, and the answer comes back quite predictably that he’s always realized it perhaps even since he was young: “It’s always been boys.” Nick is not quite sure who or what he is, and Charlie, always the conciliator, assures him that he doesn’t have to immediately figure it out, like waking up and saying “I guess I’m gay now.” Which strangely is precisely what as a young man I did.

      Yet when they might find joy in an ameliorating kiss, Nick pulls back, apologizing despite their agreement to never be sorry for who they are with one another. It’s a scary this for anybody, and particularly the young Nick and Tara to sexually declare their differences in a world that isn’t fully able to embrace them.

      Meanwhile the Higgs girls and Truham boys are performing a concert, with rehearsals that again bring the girls and the boys together in this world of whirlwind changes. Nick wants to come to the Friday night concert, but Charlie is not at all sure that he needs to be there. After all a jock at a musical soiree might be a sign of something.

    And Nick actually dares to confess to his former girlfriend Tara that Charlie and he “are actually going out,” a truly dangerous admission in a world of young rapaciously gossipy kids. Yet both Tara and Nick once felt they were a couple and their own confusions make for a possible bonding, at least worthy of a lunch. And before you know it, Tara and Darcy have made plans for a double date with Nick and Charlie. They too seem sympathetic to Nick’s confusion and dilemma, and Tara tries to warn him that coming out can most definitely be problematic.

       But then Nick feels some relief and even joy in having been able to share his love of Charlie with someone else, and that is, underlying the whole weave of dilemmas, what begins the process of sharing one’s identity and love with the rest of the world. This series gets it perfectly right.

      Even Charlie admits to his sister, vaguely, that he and Nick are now a pair. Although strangely he’s even more tentative than Nick, being always the one who is afraid of hurting others and of himself being hurt.

     When Charlie discovers that Nick has told Tara and Darcy, he’s naturally ecstatic. Word is out. And even more remarkably they agree to go on their first date, the first for both of them in fact.

      But things get more complex when Darcy suggests they make it a triple date with Elle and Tao. People do get hurt. In this episode it is mostly Tao, who is the only one who has left totally in the dark, about Charlie and Nick, about Tara and Darcy, and most importantly about Elle and himself. His best friends have all kept secrets and he’s taken chances in helping to protect Charlie. He’s stood up to the rugby bullies time and again.

    I have to say that the bubbly milkshake fest, looking like a rendition of the sweet 1950s with pastel colors gone berserkly into pink, robin-egg blue, yellow, and magenta and sweets poured into the shakes that might make a dentist tremble with anticipation was not truly convincing, and nearly pulled the plot’s important revelation out from under it. Elle’s pissed and so is Tao. They’ve been set-up, and Tao not told anything about anybody. 

      Tara is equally aware that sharing the truth is necessary, but also scary. When one of her orchestra mates whispers to another that she should stop looking her way because she might “catch the lesbian disease,” Tara bolts, returning the music room where she and Darcy first met, and whose door when closed in locked from within. That room represents everything from everyone in the film attempting to escape, being locked away, closeted forever.

      But the door has shut and the girls at least have time to talk it out as they wait.

      And Charlie must have at least a pang or two when Nick suggests that he might be bisexual.

      But as friends, Charlie, Nick, Tao, and Elle come to rescue to release their friends, the concert goes on, and yes, as Tara has best expressed it: “Everything’s changed.”

 

Los Angeles, November 7, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (November 2024).