Lesbian Pop-Punk Musical ‘Queens Of Drama’ Drops The Facade

Gio Ventura had left his passport at home—or, at least, at the Manhattan apartment where he was staying. The rest of us—a film student, a friend from LA, Louiza Aura, and I—had brought ours: all French passports plus my California ID. I wore a skirt. Aura wore a tube top and the lower half of a Hello Kitty pajama set. Ventura wore black velvet pants, black combat boots, and a black muscle tank. He was stopped at the door. This is all to explain how I found myself bargaining with the Pumps bouncer on the first warm spring night in New York City.

Ventura and Aura had flown to New York for a screening of Alexis Langlois’ pop-punk lesbian musical romance, Queens of Drama, in which they star as punk and pop opposites. 

Somewhere in the Parisian masc-lesbian algorithm’s milieu, Ventura had found Pumps. Maybe it was the dancers. Maybe it was the dirt bikes suspended from the ceiling. Either way, there we were. 

I was somewhat insecure about parading this particular cross-section of New York nightlife around for the two actors, who were only in town for the weekend. An hour earlier, we sat on the sidewalk sharing chopped cheeses, a grape Gatorade, and one of those giant European vapes after escaping an overcrowded Cubbyhole. Now, we stood stranded between warehouses in the seemingly desolate section of East Williamsburg off the Grand Street L stop. 

This wasn’t exactly the magnetic, alluring, underground scene where Aura, playing an earnest, curious Mimi Madamour, first falls for Ventura’s edgy, passionate Billie Kohler.

Ventura and Aura didn’t seem to mind. The two were surprisingly casual, down-to-earth, up-for-anything, and open, despite their onscreen drama. They felt, somehow, already like friends.

“I really relate to Mimi because I feel like in many ways she’s just like me—she’s very sensitive, very intense, very emotional,” Aura said in a Q&A after the screening at Quad Cinema. From her easy smile, buoyant humor, and aforementioned Hello Kitty pants, I wouldn’t necessarily have guessed. 

But Queens of Drama is full of surprises: a heart-shaped nipple ring, a bucket of menstrual blood, an addictive club anthem about riding a Suzuki (so maybe it was the dirt bikes after all?!). The director of “Demons of Dorothy” and the trans revenge short “Terror, Sisters!” wasn’t afraid to steer over the top for their first feature. 

“[We’ve] always taken chances on films and filmmakers,” said Kaila Hier, a spokesperson for Altered Innocence, the film’s US distributor, which also released “Terror! Sisters” in 2019. Built around “platforming international and cutting-edge LGBTQ and coming-of-age cinema…Queens of Drama is exactly the kind of film they wanted to support,” Hier said. “When Frank [Jaffe, the founder] saw it at Cannes, he was instantly hooked.” 

So was I, after seeing Queens of Drama at NewFest, New York’s queer film festival, last fall. The movie has everything a 2000s baby could want: spinning CDs, running mascara, and a dangerously overzealous superfan named SteevyShady, played brilliantly by real-life French pop star Bilal Hassani.

Steevy opens the film. It’s 2055. No longer the “sharpest botox needle in the box” (and it’s clear: she’s one to know), the aged-out “U-Tuber” has returned to tell how Mimi Madamour became the biggest pop diva in Paris, undergoing at least six hair changes and one epic, tumultuous love affair with eventual punk legend Billie Kohler.

Mimi, a demure Starlet Factory (think American Idol) hopeful, meets Billie, whose passion for “fucking the patriarchy” gets him ejected from the audition. Will they/won’t they be damned! From that moment, it’s all fisting and falling in love—yes, the song “Fistée jusqu’au cœur” (“Fisted to the Heart”) is one of the film’s crowning achievements. 

The score includes collaborations between Ventura and French DJ and producer Rebeka Warrior, as well as Yelle, who helped write many of Mimi’s songs. 

“It was vital for me to work with different artists, of different ages and different styles. If there had been one single person in charge of the whole, it would have felt much more like a pastiche,” Langlois told Perrine Quennesson in an interview for Cannes.

Langlois also shared a Dropbox of musical and aesthetic influences with the actors, including, of course, Madonna, Britney Spears, and Courtney Love, as well as But I’m a Cheerleader, the works of Jacques Demy, and Brian De Palma’s Phantom of the Opera. 

“I became a cinephile later on. So blending these references, cinema and TV pop culture, especially US culture, which was an overwhelming part of my youth, is a way to bridge these two sides within me,” Langlois told Quennesson. 

Someone told Langlois, “This film feels like it was written by a teenager,” the director recalled at the NewFest screening. To this, they responded, “That’s the point.” 

“When I was a teenager, I went through a really bad breakup, and so I did karaoke for one year every weekend alone. Yeah, I don’t have any friends,” Ventura joked at the Quad Q&A. “So I guess I sort of learned how to sing there.”

Langlois coaxed heightened emotions from the actors, but actively discouraged method acting, Ventura noted. “I think [method acting’s] just fucked,” Ventura said. “We shouldn’t work that way anymore, especially if we wanna do more political or queer movies.” 

Instead, Langlois coached the actors in what Ventura called a “drag” mode of acting, where the director showed clips—of Leonardo DiCaprio wailing in a field during Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet, for example—and said, “This is level one [of emotion]. Show me level five.” By piecing together parts they loved from different performances, the actors “[made] our own kind of cuisine out of everything…[it was] a Frankensteinish kind of acting,” Ventura said. 

Still, Ventura and Aura’s natural chemistry and authentic, sensitive portrayals of adolescence and aging bring nuance and cohesion to the film.

“As soon as we met…we became friends instantly, so it was very easy,” Aura said. “We had a lot of confidence, one in the other.” While Ventura has acted since high school and produced his own shorts, Queens of Drama is Aura’s debut film role.

“We all have this kid in our heart,” Aura responded when asked about how she related to each of the Mimis she played across time. “The older [2055] version of Mimi is also like me… Everyone has an inner child…[but] there’s also a very grave, heavy aspect that everyone carries in their heart. So [I] used those two aspects of my personality to interpret my character.”

“I do not cry,” Ventura added. “But I cried as much during this movie as I probably did during my entire life.”

For all its gemstones and gaudy vocals, Queens of Drama resides in the real world of teen hope and heartbreak, grounded in the longing, tenderness, raunchiness, innocence, infatuation, loneliness, and absurdity that ensue. 

For those who came of age after Y2K, it’s this era, in all its trashy glory, that we turn to with an almost ironic nostalgia: this glitter-bombed cultural dumpster fire was what we had and where we came from. These were our Simpler Times. 

When Billie awkwardly models a jazz combo for Mimi, who lies on her bedroom carpet, trying not to laugh, or when the two wrestle each other on a bartop as their bandmates and best friends look on in disgust, we remember times we embarrassed ourselves with our own artlessness, our willingness to show, learn, and love in the open. 

Yet when Mimi lucks out, the film’s tone darkens: it’s a quick road to stardom and a long road home. Her claws come out—she stops returning Billie’s calls and starts ignoring him in public—but Mimi herself refuses to do the same. Mimi’s manicured closet is the most stubborn reminder of homophobia and transphobia in a world in which we might otherwise forget such forces exist. 

But, as Steevy clucked at the film’s opening, “This is not for right-wingers!” There’s no time for that! Portrayals of vulturistic, anti-queer media serve mainly to draw the couple apart or bring them together, keeping the film’s spotlight on the two lovers.

This is, after all, a fantasy. 

It shows us both the teenagers we were and the ones we dreamed ourselves to be. “Alexis wrote the movie… like a modern-day fairy tale, with this omniscient narrator that comes through in the shape of a YouTuber,” Ventura explained. 

If Queens of Drama is a “True Story,” as Steevy claims, it’s the type of “True Story” you might see in People. Nonetheless, Steevy tells it with all the bewitching devotion and logged-on desperation of both a fan and a public figure herself, having amassed her own online following (through…well, remember the bucket of blood? But I’ve said too much). 

Pop icons have long served as conduits for queer culture and conversation, expressing the complexity, daring, and glamour we see in ourselves—whether or not the idols we shepherd and herald are actually, themselves, queer.

“I’ve been working as an actor for 15 years, and it’s hard to be a queer actor,” Ventura said. “This is actually the first movie where I didn’t [have to] pretend to like the script.”

The chance to rewrite herstory doesn’t come often. Langlois knows this. 

When the moment arrives, the queens put on a show. Mimi and Billie don’t fade into insanity or obscurity. Instead, they come face-to-face in a Midsummer Night’s Dream-like climax, reuniting through a slit in a jail cell wall. Their heads are shaved, their acrylic claws off. 

The feud and the facade are up.

In the end, this is a story that Steevy can’t capture: the lovers find peace and happiness, after all. It’s 2055. Steevy’s camera clicks off. She wanders down an abandoned alley and finds,  unwittingly, an unlocked door.

Inside is one of the most moving sequences I’ve seen in theaters in recent years. 

Aged-out queens line a makeshift speakeasy, swaying, singing, kissing, smoking, and dancing with one another. This is Langlois’ gift to audiences: not just the memory of youth, but the miracle of aging, of growing up and old and back together again. It’s the midsummer dream realized. It’s heaven and it’s here.

Mimi and Billie come onstage for one more, or one of many more, performances. Mimi’s afro is white. Billie’s cheekbones are chunky. They’ve never appeared more resplendent.

When I asked Ventura if Pumps was what he thought it would be, he responded, “Not really. But also yes.” 

There were so many other questions I wanted to ask him. What was the poetry of body-building and muscle to him? Did his mom really “turn lesbian” after watching the film? And how would he finance his next project, a Snow White parody about a curious dominatrix who whips ten retired Magic Mikes into shape?

I wondered if he and Aura ever fell in love on set. A lesser person such as myself easily might have. 

I didn’t ask. 

They looked happy, at ease, strolling the trash-littered sidewalk. I was happy too. The night was young. It was the first warm spring night in New York.