Cloudburst

Cloudburst is a movie about senior couple, Dot and Stella. After suffering a fall, Dot is placed in a care home. Stella is banned from seeing her as she is not legally considered family and Dot’s family do not approve of Stella. To rectify this, Stella breaks Dot out of the care home and they drive to Canada to get legally married. Along the way, they pick up a male drifter.

What elevates this movie is that it’s both touching as well as being really, really funny. There are moments in Cloudburst that made me laugh out loud, particularly from Olympia Dukakis as Stella. She’s got an absolute grasp on comedic timing and expression. Stella is such a hilarious character who adds a lot of lightness to this film. Generally,Cloudburst is a movie that understands and fully utilizes the inherent humour in a senior citizen saying fuck and makes use of that often to great effect.

There are also lots of touching and sad scenes done to equal competency. Cloudburst manages to blend its comedy with its tragedy/drama exceptionally well. Instead of canceling each other out, the comic scenes make the scenes of tragedy hit that much harder and vice-versa. I have seen so many movies fail to do this correctly. By contrast, Cloudburst is a masterclass in having a movie with scenes that will make you laugh and scenes that will make you cry. I did both while watching it.

Additionally, Cloudburst does something miraculous in not de-sexing its senior protagonists. Stella and Dot still keep sex toys beside their bed. Later in the movie, Stella talks frankly to an uncomfortable heterosexual man about her sexual preferences. There is a tendency for senior citizens to be portrayed as sexless beings. The same can be said about lesbians if they’re not appealing to the male gaze. Cloudburst skirts both these issues and makes reference to the sex lives of these senior, lesbian protagonists.

On top of everything else, Cloudburst has one of my favorite pieces of male full-frontal nudity in film. That’s an absolutely strange thing to be said about a WLW movie but there you go.

Cloudburst is just delightful. It’s a sweet, funny, touching film. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll be indignant and upset about the troubles queer senior citizens can face. Absolutely watch Cloudburst. It is an absolute gem of a film.

Overall rating: 9.3/10

Other WLW movies in similar genres