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I got that antiseptic for the sheep
I meant to put some kind of moratorium on m/m movies until I could get the rest of the rainbow represented in these reviews, but then I saw a movie I liked too much not to talk about. It's set on a struggling farm in the north of England and contains the tenderest, most affirming reading I have ever heard of the line "Fuck off, faggot."
The title of Francis Lee's God's Own Country (2017) at first feels like a cruel joke on the movie's protagonist. What deity in its right mind would lay claim to this gritstone damp, this thin cold tin-colored dawn? What's this view to all four winds of moors and sheepfolds and dry stone walls but an open-air cage? A single light flicking on in the rough stone face of a farmhouse just before sunrise may be poetry to the audience, but all it signifies for Johnny Saxby (Josh O'Connor) is the harshness of another day; with his grandmother in her seventies and his father impaired by a recent stroke, the day-to-day running of the family farm has fallen to him in all its muddy, grudging grind and instead of getting away to uni like his friends—or even as far as Bradford—he's stuck tramping the fells above Keighley like his father's admonition incarnate, "Don't talk wet. Get on with it." There's manure to spread, hay to fork, boundary walls to rebuild. Sheep to keep track of. Bills to pay. It's not miserabilism, but this film is not out to romanticize the rural life. Unless William Blake is willing to snap on a glove and shove his arm up a heavily pregnant heifer, the bugger can build his Jerusalem somewhere else. Johnny's having enough trouble with plain England. Few romantic heroes get the introduction he does, face-down in the toilet puking up last night's drunk per usual; he has shocky dark hair, a white wedge-shaped face like a Siamese cat whose points have not yet come in, perpetually pinched and sullen with a mixture of hangover and anger so long endured it has become as familiar and ignorable as aching muscles or windy rain. The sex he has with other young men is fast, efficient, anonymous: wordless spit-fucks in public toilets or trailers at the local cattle mart, no kisses, no caresses, and no further contact. He can't even run into a former schoolfriend at the pub without antagonizing her with his envy that comes out as contempt. He could die of loneliness before he turned twenty-five and never be able to say what hit him.
Fortunately what hits him first is Gheorghe Ionescu (Alec Secăreanu), a Romanian migrant worker hired for the lambing season. One of the pleasures of this film is its unselfconscious embrace of old-fashioned romance along with the kitchen sink and you could do much worse in matinée idols than tall, soft-eyed Gheorghe in his characteristic heather-red sweater, his heavy brows drawn with watchfulness and irony; he's a sturdy, steady worker, but to call him the strong silent type would underrate his gentleness, his guarded sly sense of humor, and the streak of violence that makes him such a satisfying match for Johnny. The territorial, dominating maneuvers that govern most of Johnny's interactions with other men stop short with Gheorghe. He tries. At their first meeting, he asks if the new hand with his olive skin and his tousled black hair and beard is "half Paki or summat"; later he identifies him as a "gypsy," which would stir Brontë echoes in this wily, windy landscape if it were not obviously an ethnic slur. "Please don't call me that," Gheorghe corrects him mildly the first time it happens. The next time, he body-slams his employer straight into the ground. "Do not call me that. I know what you are doing. I will fuck with you." Stunned flat on his back, we watch Johnny not know what kind of threat that is, the other man's face close enough for kissing if he ever kissed anyone and maybe he's thinking about it just as Gheorghe rolls off him and walks away. They fuck for the first time not long after, grappling half-clothed in the mud with a feral urgency that yet has a pattern already: Johnny stampeding straight for the prostate, Gheorghe always the fraction quicker and stronger holding him off, slowing him down, making him learn what it is to be touched rather than just taking. The second time is even more explicit, as deliberate and powerful as the taming of a wild thing. No way Johnny can twist or grasp will let him avoid his palm being placed against Gheorghe's chest to feel the dark hair and the stiffening nipples, the maddeningly delicate exploration of his own face with Gheorghe's work-rough fingers, each second of skin on skin building the feedback between them until Johnny as if he's gasping for his life seizes his lover's mouth with his mouth at last. If you want an argument against the tasteful cut to blowing curtains, the sex scenes in this movie are it. They are not generic. They are vital communication. We watch them and learn about power dynamics and trust, the leashed fierceness in Gheorghe and Johnny's late bloom into tenderness, the mixed and imperceptible degrees by which they go from men who share pleasure like packets of sugar sprinkled over pot noodles to men who might mean something to each other, if only the one of them whose previous relationship experience amounts to refusing a pint after a quickie can not fuck it up. None of it is soft-focus. Blood and sweat can be romanticized; spit and shit less so, but God's Own Country is a movie of bodies far more than it is of words, which makes them precious when they arrive but not necessarily paramount, and in the meantime we are taught to value the messy, tactile meanings of a tongue lapped like a cat's to clean the blood from a stone-bruised palm, a motherless runt lamb dressed in the skinned pelt of another so that the ewe who has lost her own lamb will nurse it. Like some site-specific fisher king, Johnny blossoms as his land does, spring breaking over the hillsides in the songs of swallows and the shake of daffodils and grape hyacinths in the wind; daybreak now finds him naked in bed with Gheorghe, their bodies unidealized and beautiful in the same metallic morning light. They do not talk about the future so much as they begin to experiment with simply living it: watching TV, cooking dinner, sharing a bath, Gheorghe making sheep's milk cheese in the kitchen. All of a sudden it is possible for Johnny to imagine the unthinkable, being happy in the place where he lives. For Gheorghe who lost his own farm with the rest of his country ("You can't throw a rock in most towns without hitting an old lady crying for her children who have gone"), it is an unexpected refuge, almost a second chance. It may have been an accident of history, but the film's pre-Brexit production makes its moral even more resonant. The stranger is the one who makes the land home.
Of course there are complications, but I love that while God's Own Country is not interchangeable with a straight romance—it's hard to picture its central dynamic working with a straight couple at all—its queerness is not defined by adversity or even acceptance; the trials its lovers have to overcome have more to do with hard luck and self-sabotage than what the neighbors might say. It's not rose-glassy. Johnny and Gheorghe use "freak" and "faggot" as deliberate, provocative endearments for one another, words understood to have been used against them in the past. A night out at the pub is marred by an incipient Leave voter who mocks Gheorghe's accent. But the difficult conversation Johnny must have with his father Martin (Ian Hart) is about the future of the farm and his grandmother Deirdre (Gemma Jones) weeps briefly into a pair of fresh-ironed pajamas because of something a doctor has told her, not because of her grandson's love life. Rural and isolated as their lives are, they are not shorthand for bigotry—Gheorghe is not cosmopolitanism from away. It doesn't feel like wishful thinking from a Yorkshire-born writer-director who is himself a gay man. It's just one of the ways the world is complicated, or not.
"I've got to go get him," Johnny says at a crucial moment in the denouement and then, correcting himself, "I want to go get him." That distinction goes to the heart of God's Own Country and its hero's journey from resentful duty to heart's desire; the earth-soaked cinematography by Joshua James Richards, the intimate score by A Winged Victory for the Sullen and the immersive sound design of Anna Bertmark all go toward building a short story of a movie with the density of an epic, a love story that feels as elemental as Gilgamesh and doesn't even require anyone to travel to the land of the dead. (Just Scotland.) Its very matter-of-factness is exciting, its specificity and its sensory detail in a medium as absorbing but visual as film, and while I have no idea what Lee will do for his second feature, I will watch for it just as I will watch for O'Connor and Secăreanu and the windbent trees beside the ruined barn at the top of the fell, the mist-pearled and wide open world beyond. This transformation brought to you by my thriving backers at Patreon.
The title of Francis Lee's God's Own Country (2017) at first feels like a cruel joke on the movie's protagonist. What deity in its right mind would lay claim to this gritstone damp, this thin cold tin-colored dawn? What's this view to all four winds of moors and sheepfolds and dry stone walls but an open-air cage? A single light flicking on in the rough stone face of a farmhouse just before sunrise may be poetry to the audience, but all it signifies for Johnny Saxby (Josh O'Connor) is the harshness of another day; with his grandmother in her seventies and his father impaired by a recent stroke, the day-to-day running of the family farm has fallen to him in all its muddy, grudging grind and instead of getting away to uni like his friends—or even as far as Bradford—he's stuck tramping the fells above Keighley like his father's admonition incarnate, "Don't talk wet. Get on with it." There's manure to spread, hay to fork, boundary walls to rebuild. Sheep to keep track of. Bills to pay. It's not miserabilism, but this film is not out to romanticize the rural life. Unless William Blake is willing to snap on a glove and shove his arm up a heavily pregnant heifer, the bugger can build his Jerusalem somewhere else. Johnny's having enough trouble with plain England. Few romantic heroes get the introduction he does, face-down in the toilet puking up last night's drunk per usual; he has shocky dark hair, a white wedge-shaped face like a Siamese cat whose points have not yet come in, perpetually pinched and sullen with a mixture of hangover and anger so long endured it has become as familiar and ignorable as aching muscles or windy rain. The sex he has with other young men is fast, efficient, anonymous: wordless spit-fucks in public toilets or trailers at the local cattle mart, no kisses, no caresses, and no further contact. He can't even run into a former schoolfriend at the pub without antagonizing her with his envy that comes out as contempt. He could die of loneliness before he turned twenty-five and never be able to say what hit him.
Fortunately what hits him first is Gheorghe Ionescu (Alec Secăreanu), a Romanian migrant worker hired for the lambing season. One of the pleasures of this film is its unselfconscious embrace of old-fashioned romance along with the kitchen sink and you could do much worse in matinée idols than tall, soft-eyed Gheorghe in his characteristic heather-red sweater, his heavy brows drawn with watchfulness and irony; he's a sturdy, steady worker, but to call him the strong silent type would underrate his gentleness, his guarded sly sense of humor, and the streak of violence that makes him such a satisfying match for Johnny. The territorial, dominating maneuvers that govern most of Johnny's interactions with other men stop short with Gheorghe. He tries. At their first meeting, he asks if the new hand with his olive skin and his tousled black hair and beard is "half Paki or summat"; later he identifies him as a "gypsy," which would stir Brontë echoes in this wily, windy landscape if it were not obviously an ethnic slur. "Please don't call me that," Gheorghe corrects him mildly the first time it happens. The next time, he body-slams his employer straight into the ground. "Do not call me that. I know what you are doing. I will fuck with you." Stunned flat on his back, we watch Johnny not know what kind of threat that is, the other man's face close enough for kissing if he ever kissed anyone and maybe he's thinking about it just as Gheorghe rolls off him and walks away. They fuck for the first time not long after, grappling half-clothed in the mud with a feral urgency that yet has a pattern already: Johnny stampeding straight for the prostate, Gheorghe always the fraction quicker and stronger holding him off, slowing him down, making him learn what it is to be touched rather than just taking. The second time is even more explicit, as deliberate and powerful as the taming of a wild thing. No way Johnny can twist or grasp will let him avoid his palm being placed against Gheorghe's chest to feel the dark hair and the stiffening nipples, the maddeningly delicate exploration of his own face with Gheorghe's work-rough fingers, each second of skin on skin building the feedback between them until Johnny as if he's gasping for his life seizes his lover's mouth with his mouth at last. If you want an argument against the tasteful cut to blowing curtains, the sex scenes in this movie are it. They are not generic. They are vital communication. We watch them and learn about power dynamics and trust, the leashed fierceness in Gheorghe and Johnny's late bloom into tenderness, the mixed and imperceptible degrees by which they go from men who share pleasure like packets of sugar sprinkled over pot noodles to men who might mean something to each other, if only the one of them whose previous relationship experience amounts to refusing a pint after a quickie can not fuck it up. None of it is soft-focus. Blood and sweat can be romanticized; spit and shit less so, but God's Own Country is a movie of bodies far more than it is of words, which makes them precious when they arrive but not necessarily paramount, and in the meantime we are taught to value the messy, tactile meanings of a tongue lapped like a cat's to clean the blood from a stone-bruised palm, a motherless runt lamb dressed in the skinned pelt of another so that the ewe who has lost her own lamb will nurse it. Like some site-specific fisher king, Johnny blossoms as his land does, spring breaking over the hillsides in the songs of swallows and the shake of daffodils and grape hyacinths in the wind; daybreak now finds him naked in bed with Gheorghe, their bodies unidealized and beautiful in the same metallic morning light. They do not talk about the future so much as they begin to experiment with simply living it: watching TV, cooking dinner, sharing a bath, Gheorghe making sheep's milk cheese in the kitchen. All of a sudden it is possible for Johnny to imagine the unthinkable, being happy in the place where he lives. For Gheorghe who lost his own farm with the rest of his country ("You can't throw a rock in most towns without hitting an old lady crying for her children who have gone"), it is an unexpected refuge, almost a second chance. It may have been an accident of history, but the film's pre-Brexit production makes its moral even more resonant. The stranger is the one who makes the land home.
Of course there are complications, but I love that while God's Own Country is not interchangeable with a straight romance—it's hard to picture its central dynamic working with a straight couple at all—its queerness is not defined by adversity or even acceptance; the trials its lovers have to overcome have more to do with hard luck and self-sabotage than what the neighbors might say. It's not rose-glassy. Johnny and Gheorghe use "freak" and "faggot" as deliberate, provocative endearments for one another, words understood to have been used against them in the past. A night out at the pub is marred by an incipient Leave voter who mocks Gheorghe's accent. But the difficult conversation Johnny must have with his father Martin (Ian Hart) is about the future of the farm and his grandmother Deirdre (Gemma Jones) weeps briefly into a pair of fresh-ironed pajamas because of something a doctor has told her, not because of her grandson's love life. Rural and isolated as their lives are, they are not shorthand for bigotry—Gheorghe is not cosmopolitanism from away. It doesn't feel like wishful thinking from a Yorkshire-born writer-director who is himself a gay man. It's just one of the ways the world is complicated, or not.
"I've got to go get him," Johnny says at a crucial moment in the denouement and then, correcting himself, "I want to go get him." That distinction goes to the heart of God's Own Country and its hero's journey from resentful duty to heart's desire; the earth-soaked cinematography by Joshua James Richards, the intimate score by A Winged Victory for the Sullen and the immersive sound design of Anna Bertmark all go toward building a short story of a movie with the density of an epic, a love story that feels as elemental as Gilgamesh and doesn't even require anyone to travel to the land of the dead. (Just Scotland.) Its very matter-of-factness is exciting, its specificity and its sensory detail in a medium as absorbing but visual as film, and while I have no idea what Lee will do for his second feature, I will watch for it just as I will watch for O'Connor and Secăreanu and the windbent trees beside the ruined barn at the top of the fell, the mist-pearled and wide open world beyond. This transformation brought to you by my thriving backers at Patreon.
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