My coworkers and I were recently lamenting the lack of sex scenes in holiday movies. Happiest Season, we reasoned, would be so much better with a sex scene, with a little more heat in general. But Happiest Season, of course, is following the formula of your typical holiday-set rom-com, which depending on your relationship to the predominantly straight genre means you either love Happiest Season or it isn’t really for you. I’m somewhere in the latter camp. I’m less interested in queer films that take existing formulas and recreate them, even when they do it well. To me, those feel less like queer films and more like films with gay characters in them. I understand why sapphic lovers of corny holiday rom-coms latched onto Happiest Season. It is indeed successful at following the formula. But of course, that formula is a sexless one. Holiday rom-coms load up the romance without becoming too sexual. They’re supposed to be “wholesome.” Hallmark, the network that cranks out the most holiday rom-coms, reproduces family-friendly films over and over in which genuine social strife doesn’t exist and heteronormative relationships and life are the key to lasting happiness. They’re fantasy films, really. So, no, these films don’t touch politics, and they don’t touch sex. Happiest Season breaks that first rule but with kid gloves on. And it doesn’t touch the second. It says, hey, lesbians can be wholesome for the holidays, too! Maybe that message lands well for some people, but it’s why watching Happiest Season for me feels somewhat like picking up a snow globe: It’s nice to look at in the moment, but when I set it back down, I’m not really thinking about it at all anymore.
Imagine my surprise then when, a few days after I told my coworkers there should be more holiday-adjacent queer sex scenes in films (Carol does count in my book, for what it’s worth), I popped on a Christmas movie I’d agreed to check out for review and was met with several sex scenes, including a queer one. The conceit of the Dutch comedy (This Is Not) A Christmas Movie is all right there in the title. It’s the anti-Christmas movie in that it pretty much says fuck you to everything in the holiday rom-com formula. It’s raunchy and full of deeply flawed characters, its central family fractured by affairs, a public cancellation, and more unsavory situations. It’s decidedly unromantic.
Even the film’s queer sex scene feels unexpected, turning into a threesome between the family’s gay daughter Jus and her bisexual girlfriend and their queer guy friend, who Jus tops. In the moment, the scene is interesting, especially since Jus seems to be discovering some things about herself. But then beyond the context of the scene itself, it’s unclear exactly what (This Is Not) A Christmas Movie is trying to say in its queer storytelling at all, the narrative muddled into nonsense. Jus teaches kindergartners to break out of gendered stereotypes for a living, a job (This Is Not) A Christmas Movie can’t seem to decide if its on the side of the characters who make fun of her work for being too woke or not. So when Jus has a very gender essentialist outburst at dinner after the sex scene, it just doesn’t fully track for the character. I admire (This Is Not) A Christmas Movie‘s wild attacks on the sanctity of holiday films, but they’re not particularly well aimed attacks and end up poking holes in the movie’s own foundation.
(This Is Not) A Christmas Movie never quite meets the potential of its promise of a fucked-up formula. Outside of an unnecessary narrator telling us way too much about the characters in the first act (which then becomes the stupidest gag of the movie in its final one), the beginning of the film is solid, signaling right away that this will not be a feel-good Christmas movie at all. You’re going to actively feel bad, a true-to-life holiday experience for many! Holidays are messy, because families are, and the holidays heighten that. But where I thought we might get a Dutch version of the Christmas episode of The Bear, (This Is Not) A Christmas Movie is too gleeful in its naughtiness, tries too hard to be on bad behavior instead of making the characters feel more real. Its oddly redemptive in the wrong places, turning a group of men’s rights losers into the good guys and reducing the harassment of the family’s sex pest patriarch to a simple midlife crisis.
So, no, I can’t quite recommend (This Is Not) A Christmas Movie to you, even if you’re looking for alternative holiday movie experiences. For that, maybe watch my favorite Christmas movie that is not a Christmas movie at all: How To Blow Up a Pipeline. My quest for a horny (the holidays are horny!) holiday movie with lesbians continues.
Family friendly is cool but I can’t trust Dutch with comedy I mean when’s last time I saw a Dutch comedian
City of Trees is a good indie Christmas movie with a sweet but very warm lesbian sex scene.
oh gosh this is just extremely on-brand for a dutch comedy, unfortunately. the moment i read the premise and the fact that it’s a dutch movie i just knew what was going to happen. i cringed at the description of the gay character’s job and the redemption of the MRAs. this is dutch entertainment to a t: never ever EVER appear to actually be progressive and have morals or some sort of political awareness, what are you, some kind of pussy???
Also, not that it matters very much because this movie seems to be a predictable edgefest (not about edging but very edgy), but I’m pretty sure the character’s name is not Jus but Jos (short for Josje)