Sometimes it feels like if you’ve seen one holiday movie, you’ve seen them all. A big city gal named Eve/Holly/Noelle is jaded and bitter and needs a small town guy to remind her about the magic of Christmas. Or Eve/Holly/Noelle makes a Christmas wish that comes true in unexpected ways. Whatever the actual plot, it’s guaranteed to have three things: zero-stakes drama, a happily ever after, and rampant heterosexuality.
And listen, they’re obviously doing something right. Or at least, something people are eating up. This year alone, between Hallmark and Lifetime, there are SEVENTY new holiday movies, and that’s not including at LEAST twenty more on other channels. No matter how cheesy the writing or high school play the sets or fake the snow, people are chugging holiday cheer like boozy eggnog until they’re numb. There are even mainstream holiday movies like Love, Actually that are widely beloved, its format of many couples’ stories eventually intertwined in some way borrowed time and time again. I remember the first time I saw Love, Actually being confused as to why all my (straight) friends loved it, because you hardly get to see enough of any one character to care about them, but as the years went on I accepted this movie as an unavoidable staple of the holiday season like that one Hershey Kisses commercial with the bells.
But this Christmas season, it’s not all about the straights anymore. Okay, sure, there are still almost 100 new heterosexual holiday movies this season alone, and our numbers pale in comparison but at least we have SOMETHING. One such movie this year is Let It Snow, a delightful little Love-Actually-style movie with teenagers featuring one queer couple. And another is the Tello original Season of Love.
Season of Love is another Love-Actually-style movie, but instead of just one, ALL of the duos are two women.
There’s Iris and Mardou, who open the movie, Iris in a wedding gown and Mardou in a tux, however it’s not their wedding. Iris is supposed to marry Mardou’s brother, but he skips town and Mardou is there to support her friend and try not to fall for her.
We also have Lou and Kenna, a clumsy woman who is opening a brewery and her neighbor who she hires to be a welder for the project. (Side note, Kenna is deaf and is played by a deaf actor, which I know should be a given and not a point to celebrate but unfortunately it is NOT always the case and I feel I should give credit where credit is due. Also, Kenna was easily my second favorite character in this movie and probably would have been my favorite if I wasn’t biased for reasons to be revealed.)
And then we have the reason I even knew about this movie in the first place: Sue and Janey. Sue is played by Dominique Provost-Chalkley aka Waverly Earp and it is at LEAST her fourth time giving us a queer character to root for. Sue is a budding musician with a smile that could melt snow and Janey is her formerly-long-distance girlfriend who tries to be supportive of her girlfriend with mixed success.
The movie has everything you could want from a cheesy holiday movie: mistletoe mishaps, zero-stakes drama, happily ever afters. To the movie’s credit, none of the stories are about coming out or really about being gay at all. It’s just a bunch of stories about a bunch of people, it just so happens they’re all queer.
Also, not everyone has this information on their Wikipedia or Twitter so I can’t give you exact numbers, but it seems to me that the majority of the people involved in this, on screen or behind the scenes, are queer, which I suppose is typical of a Tello creation, but it felt worth noting. No one couple is two white women, no queer people die, and no pairing is left out of the classic happily ever after.
I’m a big ol’ grinch when it comes to these types of holiday movies (and honestly any other highly romantic film), so I won’t lie to you: I did a lot of eye rolling during this movie. But I think that’s the point, right? It’s how I watch any Hallmark or Lifetime holiday movie, and at least this one had extremely gay outfits and pretty ladies kissing. I highly recommend watching it the way I did: with a lot of friends who are ready to laugh with you as you mock someone’s choice of passport storage or yell at the TV during poor decision making or groan at the inevitable mistletoe mishaps or put your hands on your face and smile til it hurts when Dominique’s little angel voice starts singing.
Let’s hope this is the beginning of a new tradition of queer holiday movies that aren’t tragic until we have a 100+ movie catalog of our own to choose from.
I am very excited to watch this and super happy to see it mentioned on AS :)
And on that note, I hope this movie gets a lot of support, monetary or otherwise.
Queery Holidays everyone!
EARRRRRRRRRRRPPPPP!!!!!!! I hate holiday movies because I read a cracked article back when cracked had real articles about Xmas being a just-in-case celebration because winter killed people and technically every year kills people and we should hold the heck onto them instead of trying to get them to divorce our brothers or whatever fool thing, but I’m willing to give it a queer college try!!!
Look forward to watching this on Amazon Prime! Thanks.
I really hope we get 100+ choices for Queer Christmas movies too 🥂♥️
First let me say, kudos to everyone for making this film happen. It’s not easy to get a project off the ground, especially one with ALL FEMALE QUEER CHARACTERS! :)
I’d heard good things about it so was really excited to see it and wanted it to be good, but unfortunately the film is way too cheesy, that even the cheesiest cheese cheesed out about halfway through. I thought Last Christmas was cringey, but Season of Love easily wins that competition. The eye rolls started rather early on and turned into painful groans, especially thanks to the horrid editing.
I’m always happy to support queer films, especially female queer films, and I really hope we finally realise that even us queer women deserve well-made projects just like everyone else. This could have been great, so here’s hoping the next one being better!
Thank you everyone involved for making and sharing Season Of Love. More power to you.
I’m disappointed to hear that, but not surprised. I could barely make it through the trailer because I got such bad second-hand embarrassment at the acting. I’m not sure I could handle the movie. I really want to support queer films (and have donated to fundraisers for queer films!) but I agree, we deserve better quality.
Luckily, we have Happiest Season coming next Christmas, and it stars Kristen Stewart and Mackenzie Davis, so you know the acting will be good!
So in a movie made by queer women, for queer women, with multiple couples, they still couldn’t manage to include a single butch or masculine-of-center person?
There’s one woman in a suit. There’s our rep. >_<
I am so excited for this!!
If this were straight people, I’d be grossed out – but I enjoyed this so much. Like, the cheesiness did not bother me at all, 100% on board.
Maybe it’s fine when you watch it, but I have to say that that was literally the worst movie trailer I have ever seen. Especially since at least there are queers in it. I don’t know if it’s just edited really strangely, but each scene in it seems incredibly awkward.
I’ll probably watch it since it’s only $US6, but wow.
Five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes
Sorry I couldn’t stop myself
This is great! I do want to point out that for a person who is Deaf and uses sign language (actress Sandra Mae Frank,) the Deaf should be capitalized, since you’re referring to an individual in Deaf culture!
Just an FYI, it also depends on the person’s preferences. Some people who are deaf and use sign language prefer to be described as lowercase-d deaf because they don’t identify strongly as culturally Deaf or because they feel that the d/Deaf distinction is unnecessary.
omg this was so cheesy and i loved EVERY second of it!!!! as someone who absolutely binges hallmark christmas movies every december despite their cishet-ness, i am so happy to finally get a cheesy gay christmas movie.
As long as you go in expecting silliness and can forgive some bumpy dialogue and timeline issues, this is a lot of fun and I would recommend. The amount of queerness with some good performances and chemistry makes up for a lot.