To the Stars (2019)
(On Cable TV, September 2022) At first, and for roughly two thirds of To the Stars, I was pretty sure I knew what I was watching—a historical forbidden romance, which is code for “gay romance set in a period of history where such things were not encouraged—i.e., anytime but now and even then, we’re asking you to pay attention.” After all, it follows a rural Midwestern shy introverted teenage girl as she has problems fitting in at school during the 1960s. Things look up when she meets a newly arrived girl who’s outgoing, brave, encourages her to get out of her shell and is definitely presented as a lesbian. One makeover later, our protagonist blossoms and realizes that every male in the film, young or old, is irremediably flawed, abusive, violent or otherwise unsatisfying. Accidentally roll the credits after an hour and viewers will confidently tell you how the film ends—our two teen heroines will secretly hook up and eventually flee to San Francisco, where they will become part of the Stonewall era and eventually elder role models for today’s generation. But no. As it turns out, To the Stars slightly deviates from that now-cliché subgenre to deliver something more conventional and somewhat more troublesome. (Spoilers will follow, but then again this is a film whose most interesting characteristics must be discussed through spoilers.) As it turns out, the new girl is definitely a lesbian, but after an unsatisfactory kiss with our heroine, she hooks up with another female character (a spinster hairdresser), and that liaison is discovered, which results in one character being run out of town, and the other one disappearing under somewhat depressing circumstances. Our heroine hooks up with the least awful male in the cast, and then the credits roll. It’s supposed to be a wistful happy ending and for all of the sarcasm I can muster about the now-overexposed “forbidden romance” subgenre (and that’s a lot of sarcasm), there’s something about that ending that just feels off. Even in telling us to be sad about the fate of the lesbian characters, the film ends up recreating the outcomes dictated at the worst of the Production Code—not only was happiness only found in normality, but “abnormal” characters had to be punished. The ending also seems at odds with the rest of the film, which (in the tradition of many female-centric films of late) paints the male gender in such an overwhelmingly negative brush that lesbianism or spinsterhood seem like the most logical outcomes. It’s an ending that damages a film that should have figured things out earlier and does have its undeniable qualities. The bleak cinematography reinforces the isolation of the co-leads, and Kara Hayward is frankly adorable prior to her characters’ makeover. But in the end, the film seems to take another direction than what it had been going toward, which either suggests that the ending wasn’t appropriate, or the setup was misleading. Either way, To the Stars is unsatisfying—even to those, like me, who have had their fill of by-the-numbers forbidden romances.
