Streaming: Four Mothers and the growing canon of queer acceptance

Thornton has made it an expressly queer story of a gay middle-aged writer (a wonderful James McArdle) whose romantic life is thwarted by his live-in relationship with his spiky eightysomething mother (Fionnula Flanagan). This sweetens and complicates the farcical setup of the original, as our protagonist unwittingly becomes a catch-all carer for other gay men’s mums in the community. Four Mothers is droll and gentle, but in its own way markedly progressive: films about queer adults still negotiating their identities with their elderly parents are unusual, with or without this one’s delicacy and wit.

In its benevolent, laid-back view it reminds me of The Sum of Us (Amazon Prime), a winning but little-remembered Australian dramedy from the mid-90s, starring Russell Crowe as a young gay man whose search for love is almost overbearingly supported by his doting, widowed father (Jack Thompson). It’s a little too cute in places, but its subversion of conventional masculine stereotypes across generations was bracing then, and is still moving now.

In both films, the coming-out process is way in the past; most queer parent-child stories, however, are centred on that fragile rite of passage. Take Luca Guadagnino’s woozy summer romance Call Me by Your Name, which isn’t expressly family-focused until that memorable, late-film conversation between Timothée Chalamet’s coltish 17-year-old – besotted with a man for the first time – and his wise, observant father, exquisitely played by Michael Stuhlbarg. It’s an exchange layered with empathy, understanding and regret on all sides that left many a gay viewer wishing their coming-out talk had gone differently.

For others, the more fractious dynamics in Dee Rees’s superb Pariah may resonate more honestly, as its teenage lesbian heroine Alike (Adepero Oduye) must reckon with the fact that, while the rest of her family might meet her halfway, her stringently Christian mother will never accept her for who she is. Escaping her influence, Alike reasons, is “not running but choosing”.

Then there is the small but growing bracket of films about children, grown up or otherwise, encountering their parents’ queerness. Christopher Plummer won an Oscar in 2011 for his turn as an octogenarian widower finally revealing his true self to his adult son (Ewan McGregor) in Mike Mills’s richly autobiographical Beginners. It came shortly after Lisa Cholodenko’s The Kids Are All Right offered a wry, contemporary view of lesbian parents faced with their teenage son’s curiosity about his biological father.

Finally, Sophie Hyde’s achingly felt 2013 drama 52 Tuesdays (Filmzie) tells a story that may become a more familiar one in years to come, following a teenage girl coming to terms with the gender transition of her mother. Identities may shift and change, but parental bonds hold fast.

All titles in bold are widely available to stream unless otherwise specified.

Photograph by Mk2 Films