Carey Mulligan spent some of her stint hosting Saturday Night Live making light of how few light films she does, including the movie for which she’s currently Oscar-nominated, Promising Young Woman. But she also made some room to make light of serious movies, too. One of the highlights of the night was the fake trailer for a subgenre that’s taken off in the last few years — an art-house staple that gave way to the parody entitled Lesbian Period Drama.
The target was movies like Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Ammonite, and The World to Come — quiet, gentle, happy-sad movies about women in love in the distant past, when such things were truly verboten. The trailer finds Mulligan and Heidi Gardner as tight-lipped women in a remote seaside manse, sometime in the 19th century. There’s hesitant conversation. There’s “12 lines of dialogue” over a “two and a half hour runtime.” There’s rock picking and carrot washing. There’s “Academy Award-winning glance choreography,” with our two leads exchanging furtive looks. And there’s lots of wind.
Kate McKinnon even swings by, as the much gabbier, tuxedo-clad ex to Gardner’s character, who mocks the token graphic sex scene played by two straight actresses and helmed by a male director. Was it as funny as “Satan’s Alley,” the horny monk trailer from Tropic Thunder, starring Robert Downey Jr. and Tobey Maguire? Not quite, but not for lack of trying.
You can watch the sketch in the video above.
