Love, Charlie: A review of Netflix's new hit, "Heartstopper "
A tender fantasy on the theme of first teenage love.
Charlie Spring (Joe Locke), an awkwardly curly-haired high school student, feels like an outcast at school. After his recent coming-out party, his classmates bully him with and without cause. One day Charlie meets Nick Nielson (Keith Connor), a handsome athlete with a kind heart and a scattering of freckles on his face, and, of course, immediately falls in love with him. But how to tell Nick about his feelings and not to destroy the main thing, their warm-hearted friendship, Charlie does not know. The situation is made worse by the fact that Nick seems to like girls...
In recent years, the streaming service Netflix seems to have become a major record-breaker for teen film adaptations - but unlike the trilogy "To All the Boys with Love" or the same "Kissing Box," "Heartbleed" steps out of the usual world of heteronormative romance, illustrating the relationship between two young men, casual desk-mates, who suddenly turn out to be kindred spirits. Notably, the series, based on the comic book series of the same name by British writer Alice Osman, is almost devoid of the typical angst of LGBTQ filmmaking: self-acceptance occurs without over-the-top drama and excessive reflection. And while Charlie, in his own words, has always been aware of his sexual orientation, for Nick this realization comes gradually - through feelings, emotions and new life experiences. Both paths are not without their excesses in the form of homophobic peers or a prickly sense of inner loneliness, but these problems do not seem permanent and certainly do not break the lives of the main characters - the generation of zoomers grew up in a world that has already abandoned the stigma of homosexuality, they simply do not understand the problems of millennials, and plots like "Bobby" or "Erased Person" have no place here at all.
Much more "Flutter of the Heart," with its elegant color palette and succinctly exposed shots, resembles the recent LGBTQ hit "With Love, Simon," starring Nick Robinson. However, while "Love, Simon" could be described as a sort of unofficial guide for people in the process of realizing their sexual identity, "Fluttering Hearts" is more like a typical romcom with a wide range of inclusivity: in addition to the dominant romantic story of Charlie and Nick, the show features a relationship between two girls and a transgendered guy and girl. None of the complementary lines tries to take over the narrative, but at the same time, they do not appear on the screen solely "for the tick". All the characters coexist quite harmoniously within the given timeframe, managing to show the audience many different challenges of puberty: from complex conflicts within the social hierarchy to more simple and understandable difficulties in communicating with friends and maintaining the balance of life.
Many fans of the Alice Osman comic book complain that the Netflix adaptation made Charlie and Nick's relationship more ephemeral, leaving the lion's share of its emotional depth to the original book, which, let's face it, not everyone will get to. Still, "Fluttering Hearts" is hardly a story of wasted potential, its deliberate lightness and lightheartedness being exactly what we lacked in LGBTQ cinema of the last century, and what we so desperately need now.
This article was sponsored by Gulsen Demir
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