Jaime is sent to live with her Jehovah’s Witness aunt and uncle away from temptation and her life. Once there, she meets Marike and starts a young romance with her, against all odds, which leads them both in places they could never have planned.
Written and directed by Sarah Watts and Mark Slutsky, this coming-of-age lesbian Jehovah’s Witness romance is much more than its description could bring up and also exactly that. It’s a hard to describe film here, especially in a few sentences. However, it’s a strong film with staying power. It has many themes at its center and doesn’t judge necessarily, but gives a view into a community few know about from the outside while also bringing an outsider to them in the story. The writing here is solid with careful attention given to the lead characters, making them fully human, with hopes, goals, challenges, and beliefs. The story itself is fairly simple and setting it in the Jehovah’s Witness community of Quebec gives it another layer. For those with less knowledge of Quebec (as a province) culture, the city of Montreal and the countryside are very different places and the place where the lead ends up is rather remote with a lot less variety in its residents. This works here in terms of bringing forth the otherness in the lead, showing her as different not only because she’s a lesbian, but mostly because she is an outsider. The film takes all her levels of otherness and brings them forth to create a strong story with a strong lead.
The lead of Jaime is played by Anwen O’Driscoll who does fantastic work of giving her character something more. She’s a teenager who is a bit lost on many fronts and looking to belong which she finds, but not really, giving her a range of subtle and no-so-subtle emotions which O’Driscoll brings to the screen with great talent. Playing her love interest Marike is June Laporte who is fantastic here, she even steals a few scenes by giving her Jehovah’s Witness character something extra, that want to live, that want to love and be loved. She’s excellent here. The cast overall is great, all giving restrained performances that work quite well with the material.
The film has another strong element in its cinematography. The work by Gayle Ye here is quite strong and really sets the tone for the location, far from the city, remote, a bit grey overall. Her work here is nice to look at and doesn’t take away from anything going on between the characters. It’s not flashy, it’s just right.
You Can Live Forever is strong Anglo-Quebec-Jehovah’s-Witness-lesbian-coming-of-age story if that were a sub-genre. It takes a location that is rather homogenous in population, read white cishet Catholics, and gives a view within a smaller group of its population where someone of is already the other just about anything they go, even just by being a teenager and feeling like an outsider by that sole fact, and adds on other layers of otherness, giving the film a powerful story and a strong lead.