Beyond Love

By the hour mark in Beyond Love, I’d begun constantly checking to see how much time I had left in the film. And not for the usual reasons. Usually it’s because the movie is boring or badly paced. Beyond Love is paced fine, I guess. It’s not necessarily boring either. No, I kept checking the run time because I desperately needed to know how much longer I had to spend with this story and these characters who I’d begun to well and truly hate.

Beyond Love didn’t go how I expected based on the premise. Which should be a good thing. The film is a crossover of two common queer subgenres. The first being conception drama. The second subgenre is WLW and MLM friendships. Basically, we’ve got a lesbian couple (Marina and Anna) who are friends with a gay couple (Tony and Stefano). The lynchpin between these couples are Marina and Stefano, who have been friends since childhood. Marina and Anna want to have a kid. But Italy provides no pathways for a lesbian couple to get inseminated or adopt. You’d think you could guess how this goes. And you’d probably be wrong. Unless your prediction was that for some reason, it involves increasingly violent sex work.

What?! Why?! I truly don’t know how we got from Stefano wanting to help a friend have a child to violent sex work. This subplot culminates in a deeply unpleasant scene where Stefano is bound, stabbed and gang raped by two men. The good/bad news is that there’s very little lasting fallout from this. Marina and Stefano repair their friendship following this event and do something else that moves the plot along. And then, that’s basically it. Stefano and Tony get back together and have their first sex scene of the film less than 10 minutes after the rape scene. After that, it’s not really brought up again. It’s not like I want this fictional guy to be more traumatized. But it did feel like Beyond Love showed me a very extreme scene and then expected both its characters and audience to just move along after it.

So much of this movie is characters making extremely bad decisions that constantly escalate the situation. It’s not fun to watch. I really, really ended up hating these characters. They’re all so stupid and also not very likeable. I don’t understand how any of them forged successful, long-lasting relationships and general success in life previous to the start of the film. What we see in the movie is these characters being messy, impulsive, dramatic and frequently self-destructive. Gosh, I can’t wait for these characters to raise a baby. That child sure will be in safe, stable hands.

Beyond Love might’ve worked if me and the film were on the same page. That page being that these characters fucking suck. But I’m pretty sure the film wants me to like and root for them. So, if that’s the case, they really fucked up. I don’t like any of these characters, nor do I really care about their relationships. For fuck’s sake, Marina and Anna have a huge argument after Marina floats the idea of them raising a baby. Why? Because both women want to carry the child. If that’s the sort of thing you see as a reason to fight as opposed to a good thing, this relationship might be beyond repair. Co-parenting is gonna absolutely kick their ass.

On a technical level, Beyond Love looks fine. And it technically holds together as a story. There’s a three-act structure and all that. But Jesus Christ, I had such a bad time watching this. These characters are so unpleasant and the film often doesn’t seem to realize that. And then we get this needlessly gritty subplot about sex work and exploitation. Unnecessary! And poorly handled. Beyond Love might be the worst lesbian conception dramas I’ve seen. I’d strongly advise giving this one a miss.

Overall rating: 3/10

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