Emily Ruhl | Blue Moon / 2021

the end of beginning

by Douglas Messerli

 

Emily Ruhl (screenwriter and director) Blue Moon / 2021 [13 minutes]

 

Los Angeles Director Emily Ruhl explores the simple dynamics of a budding lesbian relationship between her two engaging characters Maya Davis (Olivia Berris) and Petra Lindvall (Audra Rae Thornton), who obviously have met up with one another several times, but on this on this special day are having their first serious date. Maya introduces her new friend to a very special place—a view of the sprawling city from the far reaches of Sunset Boulevard which when lit up at night, as Ruhl shows it here, has appeared in many a movie. It is a very lovely view, however, and the two are delighted to share the sunset as the vast expanse of city lights come alive below them.

      From there they move on the house that has been left Maya by her divorced father. It’s a sweet rustic place, where the two get to know one another better, Petra describing her past life as being packed away in boxes in her parent’s residence far away, and Maya sympathizing with her unhappy youth by describing her own miserable childhood, almost a requirement for LGBTQ films.

     Petra, spotting a guitar set up against the wall, plays a short tune, while Maya begins to make love to her, the two joining each other in bed for a truly sensual sexual workout in which it appears Maya has an orgasm—the entire sexual scene representing women which we simply don’t see often enough in LGBTQ movies.

     It’s clear that any hesitancy these two might have had in the past, has been wiped away in this afternoon and evening, and unless the film is somehow tricking us, we are assured that this couple will soon settle down to receive the gift of one another that one discovers only through a quirk of chance—a blue moon is the second full moon of a month that appears only by the happenstance of extra calendar days in certain months—a musical theme of this short.

     The blue moon also symbolizes completion, fruition, and culmination, but here I am certain we are not meant to read that as an ending but rather as an end to the two women’s’ loneliness and a beginning of their full relationship.

      This is not a profound or eventful work, but a gentle reading of the fulfillment of love, the kind of work that doesn’t show up too often in the busy, troublesome, messy world of LGBTQ lives.

 

Los Angeles, October 22, 2021

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema (July 2025).