Beautiful Thing (1996) on Netflix
Jamie, bullied at school, lives with his mother Sandra on a Thamesmead estate. He is drawn to Ste, the boy next door, beaten at home. Sandra lets Ste stay the night.
- Netflix3.7/5
- IMDb7.6/1027,646 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes92%
Trailer
Plot summary
On a council estate in southeast London, Sandra is raising her son Jamie alone while carrying on with a string of boyfriends and hoping to run a pub of her own. Her latest is Tony, a neo-hippie. Sandra spars with Leah, a neighbor thrown out of school who spends her days on her mother's Cass Elliot records and on drugs. At school, Jamie is bullied for his shyness and his refusal to play football, and he keeps a secret crush on Ste, the boy next door, who is beaten by his father and older brother. When Ste is beaten one night, Sandra takes him in, and he shares Jamie's bed, sleeping head-to-toe.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Beautiful Thing (1996)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Jonathan Harvey, who wrote the script, had to face the issue of the boys' ages: the two were initially meant to be 15 and 16, but those ages were below the age of consent in Britain, so 17-year-olds were auditioned for the roles.
- Harvey said they eventually decided to take out any references to specific ages, but not for legal reasons: it was because Gay Times objected to their magazine being used in the film if there was going to be any mention of the boys being under age.
- First assistant director Susie Liggat recalls that electricians refused to work on the scenes in which Jamie and Ste are seen kissing in the woods, so a compromise was reached whereby they set up the lights and then left before the scenes were shot.
- Beautiful Thing premiered at the London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival in March 1996, after initially being rejected by the Berlin Film Festival, and it was awarded Best Film at the London festival.
- The Gloucester, the gay pub in Greenwich where a key scene was shot, had a rainbow plaque installed in 2023 denoting it as a significant place in LGBTQ history, because of the film.
- The film includes a scene where Jamie steals a copy of Gay Times from a newsstand, and shops at the time reported that multiple teenagers were also stealing copies of the magazine as a “rite of passage”.
