He’s a handsome guy but a bit of a nonentity, and spends most of the runtime in Paris while both he and Marta try to navigate their newly long-distance relationship. Gabriele, by the way, is Marta’s new man, since she broke up with Arturo off-screen between films.
Both get subplots in Still Out of My League which are folded into Marta’s relationship with Gabriele in ways that don’t feel worthless but don’t always feel entirely natural either.
The film’s secret weapon is Marta’s relationship with her friends Federica and Jacopo, who fulfill multiple roles in her life thanks to the absence of her parents.
For the most part, though, it plays out like a conventional teen-focused romantic comedy, for better and for worse. It’ll kill her eventually if she can’t find a transplant, which in this film functions as a kind of last-minute narrative curveball designed to upend the central romance, which had already been through a few ups and downs by the third act. Marta has Mucoviscidosis, a genetic disease that causes her lungs to fill up with sticky mucus. Netflix’s Italian rom-com Still Out of League, a sequel to Out of My League, is another entry in the storied canon of films in which one or both leading characters are terminally ill. That means it's likely to be seen by a much wider audience than any of the films listed below, which were smaller, quirkier, independent productions.This article contains major spoilers for the Still Out of My League ending. Love, Simon isn't the first film to tackle what it's like to come out in high school, but it is the first one released by a major studio. That's admirable, even if the film's chaste attitude toward sex means they're seeing only a part of a version of themselves onscreen. It's entirely intentional - in interviews, filmmaker Greg Berlanti says Love, Simon presents a well-scrubbed version of the coming out process so that queer kids can finally see an idealized version of themselves onscreen. But once again that familiar apportioning occurs - Simon's sexuality is kept feathery and abstract, and any depiction of same-sex attraction is saved for the film's emotional crescendo. Love, Simon is also set in a high school, and also features a young man struggling to come out - it's the story of its main character's private and public acknowledgement of his Queer Identity. Monkey See A Gay Teen Romance, Sealed With A Peck: 'Love, Simon' That fact also serves, intentionally or not, to cause these films to concern themselves more expressly with Queer Identity than Queer Desire.
In American films like Making Love (1982), In & Out (1997), Beginners (2010) and 4th Man Out (2016), the process of coming out is complicated by the fact that it occurs later in life than is usual. Which is probably why we keep making movies about it. It's marked by fits and starts, denials and avowals, fraught conversations in somebody's car, the fear of rejection and, hopefully, the relief of acceptance. It has a timeline, and not necessarily a smooth one. What does not vary in the process of coming out is the fact that it is a process. The process of coming to terms with one's sexuality varies widely, depending on the individual - it can be scary, invigorating, heartbreaking, life-affirming usually it's some complex combination of those feelings and more. Billy (Alex Lawther) and Blah Blah Blah (AnnaSophia Robb) in 2018's Freak Show.