Mini Appreciation: ‘Losing Chase’

I’ve seen Losing Chase a hundred times but this past weekend I found myself in the mood to watch something familiar and comforting. And now I feel called to write a little something because… well, why not?

Helen Mirren and Kyra Sedgwick are rather brilliant in this little film. Mirren plays a free spirited housewife (Chase) on the mend from a nervous breakdown who finds solace in the company of an earnest young woman (Elizabeth) hired to help her ‘round the house. Despite early challenges, the two find a commonality in their respective traumas.

As you’d expect, a delicate bond forms. What’s, perhaps, not so expected is the underlying queerness of that bond. So entrenched are Mirren and Sedgwick in these roles that the depth and complexity of their characters’ feelings seep through the screen. In Mirren’s Chase, there’s hope, curiosity, triumph, and a sense that she’s finally found where she belongs and to whom — a late-in-life queer awakening, if you will. With Sedgwick’s Elizabeth, the audience journeys through the thick of another kind of awakening: one that breeds all the same hopes and desires but is bridled with shame and fear in place of the curiosity Chase so wishes they could both explore.

In the end, the film is a touching piece of storytelling, the strength of which is demonstrated in its reliance on character development and exploration instead of the on-screen consummation of love we’ve grown accustomed to seeing in the decades since Losing Chase was made. I personally hold films like these close because they show us rather plainly how love can flourish without the flesh, how it can quite easily transcend all our “traditional” ideas of what it means to show someone you love them. Even Chase says in the end that she sees Elizabeth in her dreams. Her love lives on.

For me, there’s something so interesting and even radical about the depiction of people loving each other without consuming one another. I suppose this comes from my own fascination with older films where sex was verboten. Even so, homoeroticism still found its way to the fore — our stories were told in spite of the norms of the time. In my mind, Losing Chase is an extension of that legacy of queer storytelling.