It doesn’t happen very often that you have two worthwhile films with lesbian themes, shot within the same year, by the same director, with the same actresses in the lead roles. The World Unseen, which opened earlier this month after a strong showing on the queer film fest circuit, was the directorial debut of Shamim Sarif, who also penned the novel on which the film is based and wrote the screenplay. In the film, Lisa Ray plays Miriam, an Indian wife and mother living within the dual oppressive cultures of her Indian heritage and apartheid South Africa, where she lives with her husband and three children, and Sheetal Sheth portrays Amina, an Indian woman living within the boundaries of apartheid law, which allows her to own a cafe, while her silent business partner, Jacob (David Dennis), a black man, can only work for her.

The World Unseen is a stunningly shot directorial debut, filled with sweeping cinematography of the South African landscape and buoyed by marvelously nuanced performances by Ray and Sheth in the lead roles. Miriam has been long oppressed by both her culture and her husband (who’s keeping busy diddling around on the side with his seductive sister-in-law while Miriam, the obedient wife, cares for their three children and minds the family’s remote country store); when she meets Amina and a friendship — and then more — blossoms between the two women, Miriam’s inner progressive woman starts to surface, setting up well-crafted dramatic tension both within her relationship with her husband and with the greater world, as she struggles with her conflicting feelings for her family and Amina, and a growing desire for independence. Racial tensions in apartheid South Africa bubble through the film as well, as Jacob develops a dangerous and illegal relationship with a sympathetic older white woman, and Amina protects Miriam’s sister-in-law, who’s married to a white man, from arrest when they visit South Africa from Paris.
This is one of the better lesbian-themed films I’ve seen recently, in part because of the excellence with which it was crafted, and in part because it addresses the complexities of love between two women within the larger canvas of oppression, racism and sexism within the culture in which it’s set. Performances by both Ray and Sheth are excellent; they’re both playing strong-minded women here, one who’s succumbed to societal expectations and one who defies them, and the chemistry between them is palpable. What’s perhaps most striking about The World Unseen, though, is how relevant many of the issues it addresses still are, more than 50 years after the time in which the story is set.
The unspoken story of how far we’ve come — and, more importantly, how far we haven’t come — is inadvertently highlighted by the release of I Can’t Think Straight this weekend, hot on the heels of the release of The World Unseen. I Can’t Think Straight is also directed by Sarif, and again stars Ray and Sheth as women inhibited by their cultures and attracted to each other, but apart from the commonality of their themes, the two films couldn’t be more different. Where The World Unseen is a sweeping period drama, I Can’t Think Straight is the modern, lively, often funny, fast-paced tale of Tala, a Jordanian living in London whose family is desperate to see her finally marry well after numerous broken engagements, and Leyla, an Indian woman also living in London, whose mother in particular is blind to the signs that her daughter not being married has less to do with the personalities of the candidates for the role of son-in-law than with their gender.
Whereas in The World Unseen, Ray takes on the role of the oppressed woman who inner strength is awakened by the stronger Amina, in I Can’t Think Straight, the actresses more or less reverse roles, with Ray playing the more extroverted Tala while Sheth brings nuance to the role of the more tentative Leyla. What I particularly liked about I Can’t Think Straight, though (in spite of some problems with a relatively typical lesbian-themed script and a few instances of awkward dialogue), is the way in which the characters flip midway through the film, with Leyla, who starts out being more uncertain in accepting herself for who she is, ultimately becoming the driving impetus for Tala finally deciding to stop living a lie. Seeing the two films back-to-back, what’s particularly striking is the underlying issue that, however many strides we may have made as a society in accepting that there are different kinds of love, it’s still not much easier for a modern woman (or man, for that matter) to come out to family and friends as queer than it would have been half a century ago.
Although the title of The World Unseen refers to the unique position legally of Indians living in South Africa during apartheid, it could equally refer to the modern world in which members of the LGBT community still live today. How many of us are living lives in a world unseen by those who should love us for who and what we are, even if we didn’t grow up to be quite what our mothers, fathers, extended families and friend thought and hoped we would be? How many of us, still, hide our true nature from family, friends and co-workers for fear it will change what they think of us, alter their perception of our worth as people?
I Can’t Think Straight addresses these issues in a modern setting with warmth and humor; The World Unseen addresses them within the context of apartheid South Africa in the 1950s. How ironic that two films set half a century apart deal with very similar issues around self-acceptance and acceptance by others; how sad that in 2008, with the gay rights movement galvanized, perhaps, as never before, so many of us still live our lives hiding who we really are from those around us.

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