The Half of It : The Netflix movie is a tale of a queer love triangle

Dharshana Kathiresan, INN/Chennai, @Infodeaofficial 

What is a classic love tale, is it a bookish girl falling for a popular boy or vice versa. The above storyline is so strongly punched in our hearts, making it quite hard to understand the same tale, when genders of the same kind are involved in love.

Even though platforms like Netflix, has given an upper hand to queer related plots and themes, these films could get a little more appreciation for what it is.

‘The Half of It’, a Netflix highschool comedy, is similar to the course of events of most teen dramas, (example, Sierra Burgess is a loser) but takes a charming twist towards a queer love story, with a neat portrayal of characters, who bring a whole set of refreshing dialogues.

“The souls wander the world with forever longing to find its other half….  It’s said that when one half finds its other, there’s an unspoken understanding, a unity, and each would know no greater joy than this…”, begins the movie with the Chinese-American teen Ellie (Leah Lewis) in the simple town of Squahamish.

Living with her dad, taking care of him, and using her accomplished writing skills to complete her classmates assignments, is pretty much all that constitutes the life of Ellie, who almost feels like an outsider in her school. The high school in the movie is pretty much a picture of the known bullying version.

But her lonely life takes a surprising turn, when the gawky football player, Paul (Daniel Diemer) asks for an unusual favour. He is in love with Aster (Alexxis Lemire), a student who tries to fit in her crowd and is regarded only as a beautiful girl, among her other classmates.

Paul wants to use Ellie’s writing abilities to impress Aster with a love letter. Soon as Ellie invests more time into helping Paul get the girl, she realises that she might fall for the girl instead.

In a serene manner, the letter conversions between Ellie (posing as Paul) and Asher are soothingly intimate, with a major essence of two longing souls who try to work their feelings out, in the path of making their life better.

The smooth yet strong dialogues shared by them, puts us in a point where we start to wonder how soulfully these two can complete each other (that is how they both can become the ‘The Half of It’, where ‘it’ is love).

We’ve seen a lot of LGBTQ representation in high school movies and shows (Love Simon, Sex Education), and that has profoundly established the fact that queer teens crave the same glossy, love experiences, which the straight peers get to live.

This movie, yet another sensitively crafted piece, conveys the difficulties that come along with same-sex attraction at a young age.

The characters’ messy portrayal of making their life more meaningful makes the movie even more real. The very subtle take on child-parent relationship is finely packed along with the plotline, not making it a major part of the movie.

However, the director Alice Wu has ended things in a way that leaves the audience in a puzzle. In the last act, the characters work out their feelings in a chaotic manner, which has made it more abrupt and confusing, and left us with some unanswered questions.

Wu has also brought in the pitch of religion and its perception towards homosexuality, which had a thin line of connection to how the story develops.

The fine relationship between the main three characters is fueled with a great deal of chemistry, and is somewhere between romance and platonic love.

The Half of It is light and compassionate and also it’s a progressive addition to the expanding Netflix teen genre which has a great deal of audience.