the beginning of the end
by Douglas Messerli
Jessica Benhamou (screenplay and director) Love
Is a Hand Grenade / 2021 [13 minutes]
In British director Jessica Benhamou’s film Love Is a Hand Grenade we are introduced to two women performed by Genesis Lynea and Saffron Hocking, who arrive “home” to Lynea’s character’s apartment drunk and severely drugged, particularly Hocking’s unnamed character.
It’s clear that the woman, who I shall
describe as the younger one, is far less capable of controlling her behavior,
which causes distress to the elder, who keeps asking her to be quieter and to
literally control herself. These women are obviously longtime friends and
apparently—despite the fact that they refer to one another as sisters—have had
numerous lesbian encounters with one another and plan to sleep together yet
again that night.
Yet
both talk of their desires of the male sex, the younger wanting a dream image
that will combine all she imagines, while the elder, more careful thinker has a
loyal boyfriend or, more importantly, as she keeps reminding her younger
friend, she has a financé.
She is also it appears at wit’s end, loving her young friend perhaps
even more that her fiancé but also realizing that there is no controlling her,
and we observe her troubled consideration of the issues as she retreats to the
balcony standing in the cold until the other calls her back in.
But the time has come, the clearer thinking woman realizes, despite her love, to fully break with such an incorrigible relationship that represents, as the title suggests, forever holding a hand grenade which any minute might go off in her face.
And indeed it does, as bored by her friend’s insistence that she drink a
glass a water to sober her up, the younger grabs a bottle of wine, chugging it
down like it were a large gallon of soda. Once again, the elder attempts to
explain and negotiate with her younger friend that she has found someone who
loves her and she has been working a good job; her life has returned to an
orderly world which she desires more than the constant wreck she encounters
with Hocking’s character.
When she reaches for the wine bottle to save her younger friend from a
total stuporous inebriation, the girl pulls away dropping the bottle and
sending glass fragments across the room, one lodging in the elder’s foot which
is now heavily bleeding.
Attempting to bring herself back into semi-sobriety the younger
immediately grabs wads of toilet paper, creating a makeshift bandage for her
friend and calling a cab to take her to the emergency room. But by this time
the elder can hardly move, either out of pain or utter exasperation for having
had another explosion of what is always a ticking bomb in the presence of her
lover-sister-intimate friend whatever you might call her.
As the younger attempts to take her down the stairs to the taxi, the
elder pushes her out the door along with her purse, bag and a coat she has been
wearing, locking the door behind her. It has come time to break the
relationship off.
One imagines that things will not end so
simply; that the younger will return, demand reentry into her life, whatever. But the event we have
just witnessed is most definitely the beginning of the end, the very opposite
of what the lesbians have just experienced in the previously film I just
discussed. Our “hero” has apparently decided to embrace the heterosexual part
of her bisexuality so that she might live a more ordered and sane life.
To many a lesbian and gay viewer surely that decision was merely
perceived as a refusal of the work’s central figure to embrace her own
sexuality. But in this case I think that would be a misreading. Lesbians and
gays still have not fully recognized the reality of bisexuality, despite the
fact that statistics have shown over and over that bisexuals make up a much
larger portion of the population that gays, lesbians, or transgender
individuals. And it interesting just how few films are truly devoted to
bisexual realities. The age-old argument that bisexuals simply have not yet
realized that they are gay or lesbian has not yet been put to rest, and perhaps
never will be.
The director herself was startled, to say the least about the criticism
she received for this film. As Benhamou commented:
“I think most women who consider themselves
‘mainly straight’ have had an intense, inter-dependent, female friendship that
has almost become romantic. I didn’t want to label the sexualities of the two
characters – I’m more interested in how sexuality is infinitely complex as a
filmmaker, but it’s been interesting to observe how stigmatised bisexuality is.
I didn’t anticipate finding myself on the receiving end of so much biphobia.
The reality is that while I am keenly aware of what homophobia entails, the subtle
nuances of biphobia were entirely new to me. And if a short film can spark that
kind of response within my circles then I’m all the more convinced it’s an
important story to tell. The world is changing though, particularly for the
younger generations, so I remain an optimist. In terms of the mental health
elements, I wanted to show the difficulties of loving someone with severe
mental illness in a way that felt honest and true to me.”
In
this film we truly must come to recognize an ending which may allow a fully new
beginning for the central character, even if it appears to represent to many a
relinquishment of gay sexuality to the heteronormative majority. These are
serious issues which if not dealt with in a serious way, will ultimately mean
deep, perhaps irreparable cracks in the rainbow coalition. Finally, we must ask
the question are bisexuals of interest to the LGBTQ community only when they
shift away from heterosexuality or are they interesting and of value because
they accept the fluidity of sexual divides?
Los Angeles, October 22, 2021
Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (July
2025).
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