[Tribeca 2022 Review] You Can Live Forever is Tropey but has an Authenticity that Shines

The lesbian romance is a subgenre that oftentimes verges into tropes because there’s so many of them and they unfortunately fall into traps. The furtive hand strokes. The quick, but somehow lingering glances. The threat of society (religious, social, political, etc.) looming in the background. Unhappy or unfulfilled endings. Even when the film is good and enjoyable, you can sit back and start listing the tropes they use with relative ease. And yet when they are good (or even great), it’s easier to look past those foibles and appreciate it for what it’s doing. 

You Can Live Forever is one of those types of films.

Co-written and co-directed by Sarah Watts and Mark Slutsky, this lesbian period romance is set in the early 90s in a Jehovah’s Witness community. Jaime (Anwen O’Driscoll) takes a train to the small community to live with her aunt Beth (Liane Balaban) and uncle Jean-Francois (Antoine Yared) after the death of Jaime’s father. Her mother has had a rough time dealing with the death and needed some time to work through her issues in order to be the parent Jaime needs. So, in the meantime, she’s sent to live with the Jehovah’s Witness side of her family, where she’s expected to respect the culture and maybe take part in it. 

That last thing is maybe the more insidious part, as everyone seems keen to indoctrinate Jaime into their culture and while the film doesn’t condemn or make fun of the religion, it does quietly bring up the way in which religion can corrupt something beautiful. Jaime sticks out like a sore thumb when she’s around the Witnesses, with her grunge/punk aesthetics, beanies and black, layered outfits. At one of their Meetings, she catches eyes with Marika (June Laporte), a devout Witness whose father Frank (Tim Campbell) runs a lot of the Meetings. The two start up an easy friendship and soon become inseparable in each other’s lives. Marika takes Jaime on field service, proselytizing to people to get them to accept the word. And before long, their furtive glances turn to sneaked kisses and a deepening relationship between the two. 

The lingering danger here comes in fears of excommunication and Marika knows firsthand what can happen there. Her mother, depending on who you ask, was either forced out of the Witnesses or left on her own and now she is literally dead to the family. Marika has to pretend her mother is, in fact, dead. They don’t talk about her, but her memory haunts Marika who had wonderful memories of bedtime stories and her warmth. “We all have to make sacrifices to live in the Truth” Beth tells Jaime when she asks about Marika’s mother. 

All of this feels like a Lesbian Romance Bingo Card, and you can go through each development, checking them off along the way. But what makes You Can Live Forever work where others might fail is its commitment to creating an authentic experience. The film spends a good portion of time exploring the Jehovah’s Witnesses beliefs through the skeptical Jaime and the very devout Marika. Marika envisions a world of The New System where Armageddon will give way to literal paradise where nobody will die or get old and everyone who has died will come back to life. She believes this so fully that even though her burgeoning relationship with Jaime is frowned upon, she wants Jaime to become a Witness so that they can spend eternity together.

It’s in this tension between religion and Jaime’s “worldly” beliefs that a lot of the internal conflict comes from and makes for a very intriguing, sad and oftentimes beautiful watch. Even if it never subverts many of the tropes we’ve come to see in these types of films, it still manages to transcend the plot points to create something meaningful. The chemistry between Anwen and June is palpable and the writing feels grounded in real life, and while obstacles obviously come into play, they unfold differently than I expected. 

Here, surprisingly, the characters have some agency in the way the story unfolds. A lot of the agency is informed by the religious teachings and the conservative values as an oppressive force, but the two characters themselves make what happens at the end more poignant and genuine. Because You Can Live Forever grounds the relationship in authenticity, it manages to create something beautiful, sad and incredibly moving.