Leanne Hanley | Sapphire / 2021

the addictions

by Douglas Messerli

 

Harry Hains (screenplay), Leanne Hanley (director) Sapphire / 2021 [14 minutes]

 

In this rather superficial, apparently autobiographical tale, a trans man Ethan, addicted to love and drugs, creates an alter ego named Sapphire (Andreja Pejic) who struts across the set in lovely colored wigs playing out various tropes of film musicals, romances, and trippy drug scenes.

  She falls in love with Max (Lachlan Woods) who desperately loves her, the two quickly becoming a couple. While they make intense love, cocaine and heroin soon take over, and even Max who attempts to control her intake finds it impossible to help.

    We see the story played out primarily through the memories of Ethan/Sapphire, but at moments we get what appears to be the viewpoint of Max, who proclaims “At first she helped me escape my misery, but then she became my misery,” which, obviously, might also be the observation of Ethan/Sapphire as well.

     Within the depths of her suffering, Sapphire locks herself away in the bathroom, shoots up, and nearly dies before being finally sent away to an institution for help.

     The film is basically beautiful to watch, but an empty story with regard to such a serious drug addiction; certainly, it offers no deep insights about how the addictions developed or how they might be contained, although it does appear that by film’s end Sapphire has found peace with her Ethan half and, obviously, is able to talk somewhat objectively about her problem.

     The writer of this work, Australian actor Harry Hains, died in Los Angeles one year before the release of this film at the age of 27 of fentanyl intoxication. In photographs of him I’ve seen, he looks a great deal like the figure telling Sapphire’s story after the fact. And the final film was produced by his mother, Jane Bader, who plays a saintly nurse in the movie.

 

Los Angeles, October 7, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (October 2025).