Jamieson Pearce | Strangers / 2019

in bed with bibi

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jamieson Pearce (screenwriter and director) Strangers / 2019 [14 minutes]

 

An elderly patient at an assisted living facility, Lillian (Melissa Jaffer), is found by a staff member in bed with another elderly patience Mary (Maggie Dence), who Lillian insists on calling Bibi. The two women are seen engaged in fondling one another, their nightgown straps pulled away and their breasts partially revealed.

    The facility head and the doctor (Irfan Hussein), having already contacted Mary’s family, call in Lillian’s son, Stewart (Jo Turner) and his wife Adrienne (Angie Milliken), who are told that Mary’s children want their mother to have no further contact with Lillian, and the directors have determined that Lillian should move to a new facility.

      At first, the couple are a bit taken aback by the news, but Stewart quickly finds the entire thing a bit ludicrous. What is the harm of two old woman doing a bit of cuddling, and even the doctor hints that it can be beneficial, although he is far more interested in attempting to explain the “bizarre” new desire as having something to do with Alzheimer’s Disease.

     Surely their mother is not a lesbian, and any gentle and ineffectual loving that these two ladies exhibit is simply not worth moving her from an institution that she loves, argues Stewart.

     Yet when the name Bibi is mentioned, at first unrecognized by both Adrienne and Stewart, the former recalls that there may have been a servant or helper by that name. And when they speak with their mother and mother-in-law later, she seems to indicate in a vague reenactment of her past that in the time before her husband came home each evening that she had Bibi had a short while to interact, perhaps to make love. Was her mother really a lesbian? Does it matter now that she has found another woman who obviously enjoys her company? Or is it all a product of some television show, perhaps a soap opera, that Lillian and Mary daily watch together, holding hands, in which a character is named Bibi? Does their mother imagine that she is in bed with a figure named Bibi from long ago or has she found a new love in Mary?

     If nothing else, it appears that the “strangers” to whom Pearce’s title refers to are family and facility staff. For these two women are definitely not strangers to one another; or are they, both lost in the indeterminant tangles of another time.

      This lovely and quiet film does not even attempt to sort out these questions. What he see happening, rather, is a homophobic reaction by staff and facility leaders, all claiming to have no problem with the issue, while nonetheless insisting that any love that may be evidenced between the two is indeed a problem that must be immediately dealt with, including perhaps dire consequences for Lillian, who may not only being pulled away from someone she may in fact  love, but from a home to which she has now, in her old age, grown accustomed.

    Gently, with no solutions, Australian director and writer Jamieson Pearce brings up an issue that is increasingly becoming a problem in old age facilities: the same-sex love of individuals, or perhaps the love of any two individuals expressed a such an advanced age, as if it were somehow unthinkable that any such love, seemingly queer or straight might instead be perceived as a beneficial aspect of what basically have become confused and empty lives, wherein deep human contact has been inexplicably lost.

      Instead of bringing in dogs and clowns to help the elderly feel attention or a bingo man to keep their minds active, perhaps what these dying individuals most need and desire is a little romance of whatever kind—even if it might lead to the unimaginable revelation that one’s loyal and seemingly sexually content parents might have earlier in their lives explored queer encounters with love.  

 

Los Angeles, August 11, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (August 2025).