Queer period films are having a high-profile moment, from wartime romances to stories shaped by the AIDS crisis. But the legacy of Portrait of a Lady on Fire raises a sharper question: can a historical setting offer more than beautiful longing and familiar oppression? Here’s what recent films suggest about the genre’s next chapter.

Essential Takeaways

  • A landmark still looms large: Portrait of a Lady on Fire ranked 30th in Sight and Sound’s 2022 poll of the greatest films of all time.
  • The new wave spans eras: Coward follows two Belgian soldiers during the First World War, while Elsinore tells the story of actor Ian Charleson.
  • Not every period drama breaks new ground: Historical prejudice can add context, but it risks becoming a familiar, all-purpose villain.
  • There’s room for bigger swings: La Bola Negra connects queer lives across three periods in Spanish history, including the present day.

Portrait of a Lady on Fire set a powerful standard

Some films stay with you not because they shout, but because they know how to look. In Portrait of a Lady on Fire, a held gaze and a brushstroke can carry the charge of an entire love story, making the film’s quiet intimacy feel anything but small.

The film’s acclaim has proved unusually durable. It placed 30th in Sight and Sound’s 2022 greatest-films poll, an achievement that puts it in formidable company and underlines how far its influence has travelled.

For many queer period dramas that followed, the challenge isn’t simply to recreate its painterly beauty. It’s to find another way to make desire, history and character feel inseparable, rather than leaning on longing as a ready-made mood.

Coward brings wartime secrecy into focus

The upcoming film Coward follows two Belgian soldiers who begin a clandestine relationship amid the First World War. Its setting promises a stark contrast: the tenderness of fleeting touches against the rigid, masculine world of military life.

That contrast can be potent, but it also carries a familiar risk. When historical homophobia becomes the main obstacle, a romance can end up saying little beyond the fact that its lovers face danger because they’re queer. The period detail may be convincing, yet the emotional conflict can still feel well worn.

There’s no shortage of dramatic tension in the trenches. The more interesting question is what the film does with the relationship beyond secrecy and fear.

Elsinore remembers a life shaped by art and AIDS

Elsinore centres on Scottish actor Ian Charleson, who played Hamlet at London’s National Theatre shortly before his death from AIDS in 1990. Andrew Scott plays Charleson, bringing the story into the glare of performance and the shadow of illness.

Charleson’s life offers a rich subject for a film, but stories about AIDS can slip into a narrow pattern: the disease becomes the whole drama, while the person living with it is remembered chiefly through loss. The risk is that an individual life gets flattened into a symbol, however moving the subject may be.

Queer history deserves to be remembered, including its grief. It also deserves stories that leave room for people’s full, complicated lives beyond the tragedy.

La Bola Negra takes a wider historical view

Spanish film La Bola Negra follows three gay men in 1932, 1937 and 2017, weaving together stories across sharply different moments. Its structure makes a bigger proposition than a single romance: queer lives are not confined to one era, and history’s pressures can connect across generations.

The film also links hostility towards queer people with fascism, giving its political themes a broader frame. That ambition is exciting, though juggling several timelines can make a story feel crowded if its ideas don’t quite settle.

Still, a film willing to take a formal risk is worth watching closely. Queer cinema doesn’t have to choose between intimacy and scale.

The best period dramas look beyond the past

Historical settings can reveal how laws, social expectations and power shape people’s choices. But those forces work best when they deepen the characters, rather than serving as a shortcut to conflict. A story can acknowledge prejudice without making it the only thing that defines its protagonists.

That’s part of why contemporary queer stories matter too. Céline Sciamma’s Close, for instance, explores how expectations around masculinity can strain a close friendship between two boys in the present day. Its subject feels different from a wartime romance, but it asks a related question: how do social rules seep into private relationships?

The next great queer period film doesn’t need to imitate Portrait of a Lady on Fire. It needs the courage to find its own visual language, its own conflicts and people who feel larger than the era trying to contain them.

A beautiful frame matters, but a life inside it matters more.

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