☆☆½
Out there on the wind-whipped, lonely moors of Yorkshire, life is rugged and tough. It's no place for humor, judging by God's Own Country, which is a dour and serious romance that would not be a particularly noteworthy film if it were about an opposite-sex couple. But since it's about two gay men in a rough-and-tumble world of masculinity, the movie assumes its every move takes on extra weight and meaning.
Johnny (Josh O'Connor) is a farmer who lives way out there in Brontë country. He's a little slow, a little aimless. At night he goes into town and gets drunk, because based on this movie that is all there is to do when you're a farmer in Yorkshire. Sometimes he has sex with a local boy, but since Johnny doesn't kiss he's not gay. It's just that a Yorkshire farmer has needs, you see.
Johnny's glum, widowed father has been disabled by a stroke, and Johnny's sour-faced grandmother tends to the house all day, which means Johnny needs some help on the farm. That's where the migrant Romanian farmer Gheorghe (sultry Alec Secareanu) comes in. He's initially brought to the farm for a week of labor.
They head out onto the farm to tend to the livestock. The film shows their animal husbandry work in rather alarming detail. They work hard. They heat up instant noodles over a campfire. They go long, long hours without saying a word.
Then they have sex. There's no indication that they have particular feelings for each other, that Gheorghe might be gay, or that they have any real interest in sex, except that the film's leisurely screenplay, written by its director, Francis Lee, says that's what needs to happen.
The movie seems vastly more fascinated by the work the men do than their personal lives, and there's one difficult but fascinating scene in which Gheorghe peels the skin away from a dead lamb to help a little runt lamb be accepted by a sheep. God's Own Country seems to understand much more about farm life than it does about romance, and that's not an insurmountable problem except for the fact that the movie wants to be a romance.
During that first night of dirty, hasty sex, Johnny refuses to kiss Gheorghe, but it isn't long before they're making goo-goo eyes at each other, while Johnny's father and grandmother slowly catch on to what's happening. But the movie doesn't play up that drama, or really much of any drama. God's Own Country is filled with long, pauses and wordless moments, but they aren't as much quietly dramatic as they are listless. For a movie about passion, God's Own Country is missing exactly that.
Perhaps the film wants to be Britain's answer to Brokeback Mountain, and there are indications it does, but Johnny and Gheorghe lack the intensity of Jack and Ennis. It's not the fault of the actors, both are good and try very hard to dig into these men. But God's Own Country is so dramatically slack that it needs to invent a far-fetched conflict to move the story into its climax rather than let the chasm between its two main characters open up. Is Gheorghe gay, and did his sexuality factor in to his decision to leave his home country? Has Johnny struggled with his sexual identity for a long while? It's hard to know and a little bit hard to care, especially when the film tries to use a vulgur epithet in an ironic way to show how difficult it is for them to express love.
And yet ... there's something sweet about a movie that believes the biggest romantic problem between two people of the same sex is still, in the 21st century, merely gender. It's such a simple and straightforward gay drama that its backwardness is mildly endearing. Plus, there's the scenery, which is hard to ignore; the moors look brutal and harsh, but terrifically romantic and isolated.
For a movie filled with dead animals and gay sex, God's Own Country is strangely about as straightforward and old-fashioned as you can get.
Viewed November 11, 2017 -- AMC Sunset 5
1400
Johnny (Josh O'Connor) is a farmer who lives way out there in Brontë country. He's a little slow, a little aimless. At night he goes into town and gets drunk, because based on this movie that is all there is to do when you're a farmer in Yorkshire. Sometimes he has sex with a local boy, but since Johnny doesn't kiss he's not gay. It's just that a Yorkshire farmer has needs, you see.
Johnny's glum, widowed father has been disabled by a stroke, and Johnny's sour-faced grandmother tends to the house all day, which means Johnny needs some help on the farm. That's where the migrant Romanian farmer Gheorghe (sultry Alec Secareanu) comes in. He's initially brought to the farm for a week of labor.
They head out onto the farm to tend to the livestock. The film shows their animal husbandry work in rather alarming detail. They work hard. They heat up instant noodles over a campfire. They go long, long hours without saying a word.
Then they have sex. There's no indication that they have particular feelings for each other, that Gheorghe might be gay, or that they have any real interest in sex, except that the film's leisurely screenplay, written by its director, Francis Lee, says that's what needs to happen.
The movie seems vastly more fascinated by the work the men do than their personal lives, and there's one difficult but fascinating scene in which Gheorghe peels the skin away from a dead lamb to help a little runt lamb be accepted by a sheep. God's Own Country seems to understand much more about farm life than it does about romance, and that's not an insurmountable problem except for the fact that the movie wants to be a romance.
During that first night of dirty, hasty sex, Johnny refuses to kiss Gheorghe, but it isn't long before they're making goo-goo eyes at each other, while Johnny's father and grandmother slowly catch on to what's happening. But the movie doesn't play up that drama, or really much of any drama. God's Own Country is filled with long, pauses and wordless moments, but they aren't as much quietly dramatic as they are listless. For a movie about passion, God's Own Country is missing exactly that.
Perhaps the film wants to be Britain's answer to Brokeback Mountain, and there are indications it does, but Johnny and Gheorghe lack the intensity of Jack and Ennis. It's not the fault of the actors, both are good and try very hard to dig into these men. But God's Own Country is so dramatically slack that it needs to invent a far-fetched conflict to move the story into its climax rather than let the chasm between its two main characters open up. Is Gheorghe gay, and did his sexuality factor in to his decision to leave his home country? Has Johnny struggled with his sexual identity for a long while? It's hard to know and a little bit hard to care, especially when the film tries to use a vulgur epithet in an ironic way to show how difficult it is for them to express love.
And yet ... there's something sweet about a movie that believes the biggest romantic problem between two people of the same sex is still, in the 21st century, merely gender. It's such a simple and straightforward gay drama that its backwardness is mildly endearing. Plus, there's the scenery, which is hard to ignore; the moors look brutal and harsh, but terrifically romantic and isolated.
For a movie filled with dead animals and gay sex, God's Own Country is strangely about as straightforward and old-fashioned as you can get.
Viewed November 11, 2017 -- AMC Sunset 5
1400
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