Margaret Thatcher

Writer-director Georgia Oakley and star Rosy McEwen announce themselves as names to watch in 'Blue Jean,' which measures the bitter impact of Margaret ...

Marking a new chapter in her life at the outset of the film with a bleach-blonde crop that nods (like the film’s title) to mid-‘80s Bowie, she has only fairly recently come out as a lesbian to friends and family, even if her sister gingerly treats her identity as a kind of unsayable open secret. At work, however, she now has to stay tensely in the closet, her job at risk should any malicious colleague or pupil catch wind of her sexuality, or her “pretended family relationship” with forthright girlfriend Viv (Kerrie Hayes, superb). (The title-matching, stonewashed-blue accents throughout are perhaps a touch tidy.) Jean’s deliberations between variously barbed, booby-trapped options, and her time-buying prevarications in the interim, are mapped out in premature worry lines on McEwen’s still, extraordinary face. She has striking foils in the excellent Halliday, whose corrosive, truth-telling gaze belies her wallflower exterior, and Hayes, whose caustic, no-bull Viv is effectively the queer conscience that Jean daren’t voice for herself. Jean, too, picks up on the exact nature of Lois’s misfit status even before the underage teen starts showing up at the lesbian bar she routinely frequents with Viv.