2. My Beautiful Launderette
Twenty years before Hollywood would carefully portray a gay romance in Brokeback Mountain, the renowned British director Stephen Frears did so explicitly in My Beautiful Launderette. It was a critically acclaimed depiction of a society divided by race, sexuality and class and made a young actor named Daniel Day-Lewis one to watch. The movie did not show very much graphic nudity, however.
Rather, Launderette is up here because while the critics loved it, audiences hated it. A survey by the BBC eight years after this movie’s release found that the film’s homosexual kiss caused a majority of the audience to react “with extraordinary vehemence to this extract with many unable to watch or being sickened by what they saw.”
If nothing else, this is hugely telling of how far the world of film has come.
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