In Emma Hough Hobbs and Leela Varghese’s award-winning directorial debut, Lesbian Space Princess, outer space emerges as a new and inclusive habitat for a smart, funny story exploring the inner spaces of lesbian consciousness and self-affirmation.
The film pushes hard against the gendered conventions of the sci-fi genre, re-pointing them to unexpected ends.
Inner growth in outer space
The film is structured around a basic quest narrative. Can introspective Princess Saira rescue her ex-girlfriend, Kiki, from the evil clutches of a rogue group of incels known as the Straight White Maliens?
Low on self-confidence and belittled by her royal lesbian mothers, Saira sustains an unshakeable attachment to Kiki, a soft-butch bounty hunter who is as attachment avoidant as Saira is clingy.
Saira battles through the beautifully drawn pink-hued reaches of constellations and moonscapes in a spaceship (depressively voiced by Richard Roxburgh). As she reluctantly traverses outer space, she must step up to its greatest challenge: plumbing the messy depths of her inner world.
Saira hails from Clitopolis, a place reputed to be hard to find but actually quite easy (one of many running jokes that tap into lesbian takes on heterosexual inadequacy). She has grown up in an exclusively gay space, kept safe by the bubble of drag.
But once this camp seam is pierced, she finds herself in a masculinist universe dominated by Straight White Maliens and others determined to steal her totemic labrys. The Maliens appear as cigarette shapes devoid of colour. Their differences are delineated only by the amount of anger and frustration conveyed in their single-line eyebrows.
They hector and rage in their aptly named man cave, where they train themselves in the old arts of mansplaining and making non-consensual advances. Desperate to pull “hot chicks”, the Maliens have no idea how to build relationships with women.
On the other hand, the lesbians don’t seem to know how not to. They meet, they crush, have great sex, and then the intensity of attachments gets too much. Almost instantly, one starts “friendzoning” the other.
This take on next-gen lesbian relationships is an amusing counter to the slow-burn tedium of the sapphic costume dramas that have won so many fans, chief among them Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019).
Like the Wachowskis’ Bound (1996) and David Lynch’s Mulholland Dr. (2001), Lesbian Space Princess comes from the counter-tradition in which the sex happens early – then gives way to the ecstatic pulses and rhythms of story.
In this case, the outer-space story is the stimulus for an inner journey in which Saira comes to understand herself differently. She comes to see herself not as a needy young princess capable of pleasuring others with her magic hands (astute viewers will notice she has been gifted an extra finger on each hand), but as a competent, caring and self-reliant person.
Affect over adventure
Ultimately, Lesbian Space Princess delivers Saira to her destiny as a quirky and isolated royal whose emotional sustenance comes from self-love rather than crushes. This character development arc is supported by the guitar-based songs laced through the frenetically paced genre mayhem of the film.
Derived from familiar indie genres, the songs are a welcome respite from the propulsive quest mechanism that drives the story.
Beginning with a comic scene of Ed Sheeran busking in outer space, the songs bring depth to the flatly drawn world of the space adventure story. The musical interludes are drawn and filmed with the spatial depth of Japanese anime. They’re more in line with the psychic dreaminess of Hayao Miyazaki than the many 90s animations that inspired the noodle-armed citizens of Clitopolis.
This inward turn enables Saira to ditch both Kiki, the outlaw ex, and Willow, her emo-goth replacement. With the girlfriends out of the picture, the film achieves sentimental closure by zooming in on the odd-couple friendship that has developed between Saira and the jalopy of a spaceship that has been supporting her all along.
Rather than provide lesbian romantic satisfaction or ground its utopian energies in the bold new world of queer community, Lesbian Space Princess lands in the relatively unexplored space of allosexuality. The way desire is experienced by the self is more important than who or what it is directed toward.
Lesbian Space Princess is in cinemas now.