OUT MAGAZINE
OUT MAGAZINE
Are these the best bisexual jokes they could come up with??
The first trailer for the upcoming romantic comedy French Girl — starring Zach Braff, Vanessa Hudgens, and Evelyne Brochu — has just been released... and it's leaving us with a bad taste in our mouths.
Officially, French Girl follows “Gordon, a hopeless romantic, finds his proposal plans are thrown into chaos when his girlfriend is swept away to Quebec by a job offer from her ex, a sophisticated celebrity chef. Determined to keep their love alive, Gordon leaves Brooklyn for her hometown, only to find himself hilariously out of his depth in attempting to charm her hard-to-impress, French-speaking family.”
But the trailer seems to have just as many jabs at his girlfriend’s bisexuality as it does jokes about Gordon being a fish out of water. It turns out that the new job offer his girlfriend got comes from one of her exes.
Republic Pictures/Paramount
As soon as Gordon (Braff) meets Ruby (Hudgens), the beautiful restaurant owner who dresses like a model and sings like an angel, he’s suspicious of her.
His suspicions are confirmed when he’s looking through his girlfriend Sophie’s (Brochu) photo albums and sees a polaroid of the two women naked in bed that says “Orgasm Queens.”
When Gordon calls his father to talk about the issue, things get pretty bad. “Yeah, she told me she’d been with women before, but this is her ex,” Gordon says.
“She lied to you,” his father replies.
“She didn’t lie, she was protecting my feelings,” Gordon argues.
“Pop the question before she switches teams again,” his dad replies, the biphobia leaping out. Wow.
From there, it seems like the movie doubles down on Ruby being a conniving, greedy, and even predatory queer woman out to win her ex-girlfriend back through whatever means necessary.
“It feels like I can’t do anything right, unlike Ruby, who can do absolutely no wrong,” Gordon says to Sophie.
“When a woman like that sets her sights on something, she always gets what she wants,” a man warns Gordon about Ruby, as we see clips of her undermining Gordon, outshining him, and even smiling like a cat who caught a canary while she hugs Sophie and makes eye contact with Gordon.
Now, we are beyond thrilled that Hudgens is playing gay in this movie (we want her to do that as much as possible!). We just wish that she wasn’t positioned as a manipulative and sexually greedy ex trying to steal a girl from her goofy, lovable boyfriend. This isn’t the gay agenda. It’s just another lazy example of a media trope we are so, so, so tired of seeing.
French Girl comes out in select theaters on March 15 and is available to buy on digital March 19.
