On March 11, 2020, I saw Portrait of a Lady on Fire at my local independent cinema. The theatre was packed. I couldn’t have known at the time that within a few days I would be trapped inside my bedroom, that a pandemic was about to unmoor the global order, that a packed movie theatre was about to become a laughable fantasy. I took the screening’s popularity for granted. Fortunately, I knew even then that the images displayed on that screen made up something precious.

The film felt revolutionary, though its scale was small. At the end of the 18th century, Marianne is sent to a cliffside villa in rural France to paint Héloïse, a defiant young woman simmering over her unwilling betrothal to a mysterious Milanese man. The secluded setting and intimate premise facilitate a passionate affair between the two women, who find in each other a freedom the world has robbed from them. My two-sentence synopsis does not do justice to the film; each frame is a portrait of its own, delicately rendered to communicate the incredible intensity between the two women.

At the time that I first saw it, Portrait was being hailed as one of the best films of the year, and in the half decade since, it has been listed as an all-time great. (On the most recent Sight and Sound poll, widely regarded to be the definitive list of cinema’s best films, it ranked 30th, just above black-and-white masterpieces 8½ and Psycho.) To me, one reason for this is that it created, or at least perfected, a visual language for yearning and passion that other films, especially queer ones, had been grasping at for years. Portrait of a Lady on Fire feels like an elaboration on Call Me by Your Name, released two years earlier, another period film that portrays queer limerence through vast European landscapes and close-up shots of burning glares.

Like Call Me by Your Name, Portrait draws on classical references to illustrate the mythological feel of its central affair. Orpheus’s fateful turn toward the trailing Eurydice, which dooms her to an eternity in the Underworld, is a motif in the film. Is it worth it to look back when it comes at such a cost?

But Portrait distinguished itself from prior gay period films through what was then a novel concept: that the antagonist of a queer film didn’t have to be homophobia or disease. Queer people, even those from the past, could carry complex struggles that had nothing to do with their sexualities. And those struggles could be so fascinating that people across continents would come out in droves to see them.

Nearly seven years since that March screening, we are in the thick of an era where many of the year’s most acclaimed and anticipated films are historical queer dramas in Portrait of a Lady on Fire’s lineage. I’ve seen the movies, but I’m haunted by their mother. Are they facsimiles of greatness, or do they innovate on the form? Are they adding or diluting?

I’ll start with Coward, a fall festival mainstay that’s out on Christmas. It’s the 2026 movie that bears the most similarities to Portrait. It follows two Belgian soldiers, conscripted into the trenches of the First World War, who embark upon a clandestine romance amidst the oppressive masculinity of the barracks. Like in Portrait, the beautiful white Francophone leads fall in love through fleeting touches and extended looks, captured expertly by director Lukas Dhont. The duo find excitement in the secrecy of their love affair, and harvest joy from the theatre troupe they build with other soldiers. These moments of levity are contrasted with the brutality and desperation of the hideous war these young men—these boys—have fallen into.

Coward is a very well-made film, and I’m hesitant to diminish its more excellent elements. Its two powerhouse lead performances, from newcomers Emmanuel Macchia and Valentin Campagne, are truly fabulous. The film is as claustrophobic as its setting; the camerawork is freewheeling yet tight, wonderfully catching the contrast between the liberating affair and its oppressive backdrop. And its moments of passion rank among the best I’ve seen, making me feel like it was I who was basking in a fleeting glance or savouring a gentle touch.

Beyond that, Coward didn’t deliver anything more than I expected it to. I came away from the film feeling that the humming engine of its central conflict, that will-they-won’t-they I’ve seen dozens of times before, was the homophobia of the time period and the self-loathing harboured by our protagonists. For all its great pieces, Coward didn’t add up to anything innovative. They can’t be happy because they’re gay, it seemed to say. Be grateful you’re alive now and not then!

Dhont established himself as this decade’s king of intimate gay cinema with his 2022 outing Close, which netted him a Grand Prix at Cannes and an Oscar nomination. Close is a modern story about two middle-grade boys who enter the film as inseparable best friends but are gradually cloven apart by the notion that boys shouldn’t be so codependent.

Where Coward suffers because of its period setting, Close thrives because it is a thoroughly contemporary tale. The subtle homophobia that shreds at its young protagonists, which is the narrative choice that distinguishes the film as a masterpiece, could only exist in modern times. But Coward is part of a trend: gay period films that use older eras, and their accompanying prejudices, as a narrative crutch.

Take Elsinore, another buzzy fall festival movie that’s out in a few weeks. It tells the true story of Ian Charleson, a Scottish actor who played his dream role of Hamlet at London’s National Theatre shortly before dying of AIDS in 1990. If you’ve heard of Elsinore, it’s probably because you’ve heard Andrew Scott deliver a titanic performance as Charleson. The rumours are true: watching Scott body Hamlet monologues while his character’s life force withers away is like observing a supernova, impossibly bright and doomed and beautiful. I’m reminded of the Swedish runner Andreas Almgren, who ran his first marathon last weekend in New York City and won handily in just over two hours, six and a half minutes shy of Sabastian Sawe’s world record. Like Almgren, Scott’s Charleson seemed superhuman.

The rest of the movie is not so infallible. After about an hour of propulsive, wry dialogue and powerful acting, the movie devolves into a series of incoherent montages that vaguely point, through jumbled Shakespeare and swelling strings, to the Evil of AIDS and the Power of Art. These montages seem to stretch for hours. Any new idea promised by the film’s first half is atomized by its meaningless end sequence.

Elsinore bears another AIDS movie hallmark that I can’t stand: all the women (even Olivia Colman’s doctor character!) are reduced to one-dimensional caretakers whose whole lives seem oriented around nursing the sick men they unconditionally adore. While Coward didn’t bother with any female characters, Elsinore’s women are unforgivably hollow. I don’t know which is worse.

Charleson’s story is worth telling. I didn’t know about him until I watched Elsinore, and I am always open to learning about the men who walked before me, without whom I would not be able to type my opinions into a word processor and have them published on a website. But I also feel that AIDS is a stock antagonist in queer storytelling, and I have an aversion to stories where the disease, which is depicted as devoid of morals or politics, infects and kills beautiful white artists. I don’t think stories like these are useful to queer audiences anymore, aside from acting as archives of well-lived and stolen lives. All the queer people I know, including those with HIV, lead textured and dynamic and enviable lives, and they are not all sexy yet sad white men.

But stories like theirs apparently aren’t movie-worthy. The last two films that followed a contemporary queer protagonist to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture were 2024’s Emilia Pérez and 2022’s Tár, neither of which offer glowing depictions of queerness, to say the least. Before that, it was either 2016’s Moonlight or 2010’s Black Swan, depending on how modern you think Moonlight’s last act is or how queer you think Natalie Portman’s character is in Black Swan. The next will be La Bola Negra.

La Bola Negra follows three Spanish gay men across distinct eras in history: pre-civil war 1932, mid-war 1937 and the (more) modern 2017. The film flips between the three storylines, whose connections become clear as the story develops. It is a fascinating and handsomely crafted movie. Each detail is finely tuned for maximum impact, the sets and shots are striking and vivid and the film’s many deviations and surprises manage to entertain without sacrificing the air of depth that perforates the plot.

But in the nearly two months since I saw La Bola Negra at TIFF, I’m not sure it’s added up to more than that for me; a whiff of fresh air, succulent and fleeting. I was dazzled by the audacity of it, and appreciated the notion that a queer story—three queer stories—could merit such a big swing. But its ambition comes at the cost of its depth.

I don’t want to give too much away, but the movie’s modern storyline ends up playing a supporting role to its two period sequences, where, as in Coward, the villain is homophobia, a powerful force inside and around our protagonists. That being said, La Bola Negra goes further than the other films I’ve discussed here by tethering a hatred of queer people to fascism.

“Cross-dressing is the fantasy of the possible, and war is the exact opposite,” says Penélope Cruz’s scene-stealing character in Spanish in the middle of the film. In the public Q&A following my TIFF screening, directors Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calvo identified that line as the thesis and beating heart of what they were trying to accomplish with La Bola Negra.

It’s a wonderful idea that is central to the other thousand good ideas that make up the movie. But all its parts add up to something scattered and unwieldy. Perhaps it is overstuffed to make up for all the anemic queer movies that came before it, but its two historical protagonists are like the ones in Coward and Elsinore; gorgeous and European prisoners of their era.

In Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Marianne first paints Héloïse with the conventions of her time. She renders each brushstroke according to the best practices she was taught, and produces a perfectly accurate and pretty picture. In short, she does a good job.

Then she takes a fist to her painting, ruining it, shirking all the weighty customs that have kept her from realizing her full potential. When Héloïse sees what she has done, she conjures up a glare so charged with adoration and respect and envy and wanting that it fuels the most consequential queer love affair of the last decade.

When Marianne finally leaves the manor where her life was made and ruined, she seems determined to keep her face forward, to not repeat Orpheus’s mistake, to not look back at what came before. When she fails, Héloïse—doomed to a prison-like heterosexual fate but clad in white, a glowing aura haloed around her body—stares into her. Like Orpheus before her, Marianne learns the price of drudging up the past. But somehow, against all odds, she turns around and walks away.