God’s Own Country, 2017.
Directed by Francis Lee.
Starring Josh O’Connor, Alec Secareanu, Ian Hart, and Gemma Jones.
SYNOPSIS:
Johnny Saxby (Josh O’Connor) works long hours on his family’s remote farm in the north of England. He numbs the daily frustration of his lonely existence with nightly binge-drinking at the local pub and casual sex. But when handsome Romanian migrant worker Gheorghe (Alec Secareanu) arrives to take up temporary work on the family farm, Johnny suddenly finds himself having to deal with emotions he has never felt before. As they begin working closely together during lambing season, an intense relationship starts to form which could change Johnny’s life forever.
Let’s get the facile ‘British Brokeback Mountain‘ comparisons out of the way first. Yes, director Francis Lee, like his Oscar-winning Taiwanese namesake Ang, has made a charged and frank gay drama set in a rural environment. But that’s where such comparisons end.
Instead, the enormously impressive God’s Own Country carves out its own distinctively salt-of-the-Earth atmosphere, resplendent in tangy Yorkshire vernacular and occupying a landscape that is at once formidably bleak yet as comforting and recognisable as a pair of old slippers.
Key to its success is striking Durrells actor Josh O’Connor, who inhabits the role of the conflicted Johnny so completely that his brow looms like an ominous crag above a remote fell. In Lee’s world of baggy jumpers, warm brews and rutted, muddy country roads, it isn’t what’s said that matters, the movie pleasingly low on the speechifying we’ve come to expect from Hollywood whilst the discreet score from A Winged Victory for the Sullen is reserved for judicious climactic catharsis.
The mysterious allure of the natural world, at once homely yet uncompromising, finds its mirror in the slow-burning sexual attraction between Johnny and Gheorghe, depicted as a mysterious, all-consuming force that is then consummated in scenes far more frank and physically honest than anything witnessed in Brokeback. Attraction, not articulation, is the key to Lee’s movie, brought across by two superb young actors who highlight the movie’s central tension between individualism and tradition.
This is another area where God’s Own Country stakes out its own terrain: not only a sensitively traced account of same-sex romance, it’s also a tender father-son story in which future generations hang in the balance as much as individual reputations. O’Connor’s chemistry with the typically superb Hart as his ailing father strike a tough yet sympathetic note. Johnny is at a pivotal crossroads in his life, caught between the future of the family farm and his own personal happiness – reconciling the two is where the movie draws many of its most moving moments. Meanwhile Gemma Jones, usually cast as fussy matriarchal characters, is wonderfully crusty and matter-of-fact as Johnny’s resourceful grandmother.
Given the topical inclusion of Gheorghe’s character, a Romanian loner who has fled his own life of hardship, comparisons will inevitably be drawn with Brexit Britain. Lee has himself said the script was in place long before the June 2016 referendum result, although he also confirmed that the first edit was completed on the fateful day itself, leading him to wryly observe that he had now made a “period piece”.
Regardless of the politics swirling around the production, there’s no denying this is a superbly engrossing drama for our times. And, quite unlike Brokeback‘s encroaching, tragic air of pessimism and latent American homophobia, Lee’s movie dares to imagine a more hopeful world in which people of all stripes and orientations deserve to carve out their own patch of happiness. It’s a message that’s much-needed, and much-welcomed.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★/ Movie: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
Sean Wilson
Originally published September 6, 2017. Updated April 16, 2018.
