Monthly Archives: September 2017

  • God’s Own Country

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Francis Lee (2017)

    Accepting the BAFTA Best Film award in 2006, the producer James Schamus joked (weakly) that, although people were calling Brokeback Mountain a gay cowboy movie, it was actually a ‘gay shepherd movie’.  There’s no risk of similar misdescription of Francis Lee’s God’s Own Country.  This romantic drama features cows as well as sheep but no horses; the setting is Yorkshire rather than Wyoming.   The new picture strongly evokes Brokeback Mountain nevertheless – and not just because the two directors share a name.  Francis Lee has said that his debut feature ‘stands on the shoulders of films like Weekend, Brokeback Mountain and Moonlight’.  He’s written a screenplay with a storyline partly similar to that of Ang Lee’s movie, and he’s included images that consciously reference it.   Ennis Del Mar and Jack Twist get it together herding sheep on Brokeback Mountain one summer; the sexual relationship between Johnny Saxby (Josh O’Connor) and Gheorghe Ionescu (Alec Secareanu) also begins when the two are in isolation on higher ground – moorland in lambing season.  Johnny determinedly averts his eyes when Gheorghe strips to wash himself, as Jack did for Ennis’s naked ablutions.   Later on, when the two men are estranged, Johnny tries to console himself by wearing a top that belonged to Gheorghe.  There may also be an echo of Brokeback Mountain‘s ‘two skins’ image in the moment when Gheorghe flays a dead lamb and wraps its fleece round a living, weakling lamb to protect it from the cold.

    Johnny Saxby is in his twenties, a young sheep farmer – or son of a sheep farmer.  The difference between the two is blurred because Johnny’s gruff father Martin (Ian Hart), who owns the farm, isn’t in good health, having suffered a stroke:  most of the work of running the place falls to his son.  Johnny’s grandmother Deidre (Gemma Jones) keeps house for the two men.  With lambing time approaching, Martin advertises for extra help on the farm and Gheorghe is the only applicant.  God’s Own Country differs from Brokeback Mountain in four major ways.  First, the sexual feelings Johnny has for Gheorghe are not a bolt from the blue: before Gheorghe appears on the scene, we’ve seen Johnny having quick, furtive sex, behind the scenes at a cattle auction, with a trainee auctioneer (Harry Smith).  Second, the story takes place over (it seems) a matter of weeks rather than decades.  Third, it’s politically topical:  not only is Gheorghe a Romanian immigrant; the film – like another recent British debut feature, The Levelling – illustrates the economic challenges currently faced by farmers.  Fourth, and perhaps most important, Francis Lee delivers a happy ending – Johnny is reunited with Gheorghe, who moves in at the farmhouse.   This last element should spare Francis Lee the kind of correspondence that E Annie Proulx claims to have been plagued by[1].  The look and mood of God’s Own Country have been so predominantly bleak that this ending comes as a considerable relief.  Whether it’s convincing is more arguable.

    Francis Lee is a Yorkshire farmer’s son.  He shot the lambing scenes on the farm that his father still runs.  I assume the people in the home-movie footage of harvesting etc that appears over the closing credits include Lee as a boy.  In his late teens, he left home to start drama school – to do, in other words, something unexpected from the point of view of family tradition.  I don’t know if God’s Own Country is autobiographical in other respects or how much enduring affection for his roots has led Lee to downplay – or muffle – the homophobia of the community of which Johnny Saxby is part.  Whatever his motivation in doing this, Lee certainly uses it to his advantage.   He realises a significant part of the audience will assume that a sparsely populated area of rural Yorkshire in 2016 isn’t the most hospitable territory for gay relationships (even if it’s less benighted than Wyoming past or present).  He builds up an atmosphere of threatening hostility in the place, which the viewer assumes at first to be a reflection of anti-gay prejudice.   But Lee, cleverly, never makes this explicit and has Johnny, before he falls for Gheorghe, repeatedly insult the Romanian as a ‘gyppo’.  This paves the way for a crucial sequence in the local pub, where it’s clear that xenophobia, rather than homophobia, is what drives a man at the bar to bait Gheorghe and the pub landlady to tell him to get out when he retaliates.  In the film’s final scene, the no-mod-cons caravan the Saxbys had Gheorghe sleep in when he started work for them, is pulled away.   After watching it go, Johnny and Gheorghe enter the front door of the family home.  The vignette of have-not Brexit mentality in the upsetting pub sequence lodges in the audience’s mind – and enables Francis Lee to deflect attention from the question of whether Gheorghe really could settle into this household as Johnny’s sexual partner.  In spite of the writer-director’s skilful obfuscation, I couldn’t help thinking, as the front door closed behind the pair:  good luck with that.

    This is in spite of the fact that Johnny is evidently not the only gay in the village – or, at least, not the only man having intercourse with other men there.  At first, the quickie anal sex the protagonist goes in for comes across as a matter of convenience as much as an expression of preference.  Lee implies that, until Gheorghe arrives, Johnny’s unhappy life, dominated by work on the farm, is relieved only by binge drinking and occasional anal sex to which he’s emotionally indifferent.  The young auctioneer is keen to see him again but Johnny doesn’t want to know.  A conversation between Johnny and Robyn (Patsy Ferran), who likes him and is puzzled by his lack of interest in her, suggests that pressure to sustain a relationship is for Johnny a real part of the deterrent of going with a girl.  He reverts to casual gay sex in that same pivotal episode in the pub in which the film plays its xenophobic hand.  Although he’s now in love with Gheorghe, Johnny breaks off an argument between them about how things need to change on the farm if the latter is to stay there.  When Gheorghe is being racially insulted in the bar, Johnny is in the pub toilet, having sex with another young man.

    After discovering them there, Gheorghe abruptly leaves the farm.  When he gets an agricultural labouring job in Scotland, Johnny, in time-honoured romantic comedy and drama fashion, makes the long journey required to win back his lover.  Although Brokeback Mountain is Ennis Del Mar’s story, Jack Twist is hardly a sketchy character; in comparison, Johnny and Gheorghe are thin conceptions and the latter is particularly underwritten.  Gheorghe is a more or less idealised figure; his function is to transform Johnny’s grim life and turn him into a better person.  Gheorghe is more handsome, intelligent and sensitive than Johnny; he shows a greater and more imaginative sympathy towards the livestock.  His positives throw Johnny’s negatives into stronger relief.  Thanks to him, Johnny progresses from aggressive sex to full-bodied love.  Alec Secareanu plays Gheorghe well but God’s Own Country would be a richer film if he were a more substantial character in his own right – rather than someone seen in relation to Johnny, and on the receiving end of racial prejudice.

    In ITV’s The Durrells, in a cast full of likeable actors, Josh O’Connor stands out.  Even allowing that the young Lawrence Durrell takes himself too seriously while scorning others, O’Connor is more charmless than he needs to be.  Francis Lee exploits this ornery quality well.  O’Connor draws you in:  although not personally engaging, he arouses your curiosity.  What exactly is making Johnny such a pain – fear or anger about his sexuality, frustration with his work and domestic situation, a combination of these things?  Josh O’Connor’s rawboned look and large features (his face could be humorous, given the chance) hold your attention.  His roiling dissatisfaction and asperity ensure that the climactic scene, in which Johnny shows how much he needs Gheorghe, is affecting.

    The sequences in which Johnny and Gheorghe tend the animals are strikingly vivid and, to this non-expert anyway, convincing:  it came as no surprise to learn that Josh O’Connor and Alec Secareanu learned plenty about farm work on the shoot and did much of these sequences themselves.  The actual Yorkshire weather tends to reflect the weather in Johnny’s soul:  the combination of the two is oppressive but Francis Lee and his cinematographer Joshua James Richards create some impressive harsh landscapes – and capture extraordinary cloud formations over the hills.  The sex and nudity in the film occasionally smack of frankness for the sake of it but the first, alfresco coupling of Johnny and Gheorghe is remarkable, as their bodies clash and writhe on the muddy ground.  Lee repeats some visual details to resonant effect.  Johnny uses saliva as a lubricant when he snatches sex at the cattle auction; Gheorghe uses it as a treatment for a wound in Johnny’s hand.  While Martin Saxby is in hospital, after a second, more debilitating stroke and with Deidre at his bedside, Johnny and Gheorghe bathe together in the farmhouse bathroom.  When Martin returns home, he has to be lifted into the same bath, where Johnny washes him.  Ian Hart makes the father’s strangled ‘thank you’, which emerges with effort, eloquent.

    The script is contrived when it links incidents ‘ironically’.  Even though he has only a quickie at the auction, it’s enough to delay Johnny’s return home:  he’s not back in time to see to the delivery of a cow’s calf; the birth goes wrong and Johnny has to shoot the young animal.  It’s while Johnny and Gheorghe are having fun swimming together in open water that, back at the farm, Martin suffers his second stroke.  That stroke is, though, another illustration of Francis Lee’s shrewdness:  the father’s serious speech difficulties are a good excuse for his not voicing opposition to Johnny’s ideas for running the farm in future, and Gheorghe’s place in the set-up.  The virtual omission of the grandmother’s reaction to this seems more of an evasion but that’s less of an issue than it might be, thanks to Gemma Jones’s fine, nuanced playing of Deidre – a woman who often keeps her thoughts to herself, while giving the viewer expressive clues as to what those thoughts are.  Thanks to its subject, its long silences, its grim faces and places, God’s Own Country is liable to be overrated but it’s welcome nevertheless.  It marks the arrival, at the age of forty-seven, of a gifted new filmmaker who knows what he’s after and how to get it.

    7 September 2017

    [1]  See note on Brokeback Mountain for further details.

  • Detroit

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Kathryn Bigelow (2017)

    The racially charged Detroit Riot was precipitated by a police raid on a ‘blind pig’ – an unlicensed, after-hours bar – on the city’s Near West Side in the early hours of 23 July 1967.  The police, most if not all of them white, decided to arrest everyone in the bar, whose clientele was exclusively African-American.  While the arrests were going on, a crowd of onlookers gathered in the street, stones were thrown, and the Riot began.   (It continued for the best part of five days.)   With order breaking down, the state governor (George W Romney:  Mitt’s father) brought in the Michigan National Guard and army paratroopers to support the civil authorities and emergency services.  The Algiers Motel incident occurred, a mile or so east of where the rioting started, during the night of 25-26 July.  Triggered by reports that snipers had been seen at or near the motel, the incident resulted in three black male teenagers being killed by police.  A further nine people – seven black males and two white females – were beaten or verbally abused by members of a riot task force that included city and state police and National Guard officers.  Charges of felonious assault, conspiracy, murder, and conspiracy to commit civil rights abuse were filed against three officers and one private security guard.  The four were found not guilty on all charges.

    The trailer announces that Detroit is ‘BASED ON THE TRUE STORY … BEHIND ONE OF THE MOST TERRIFYING EVENTS … IN AMERICAN HISTORY’.  (Those latter words are a bold claim, considering the stiff competition.)  Less emphatic text on the screen at the end of Kathryn Bigelow’s account of the Algiers Motel incident and its aftermath acknowledges that, because the full facts of what occurred have never been conclusively established, the film has included some pieces of ‘dramatization’ based on individual witness statements etc.  There’s more than a tonal disparity between the hyped-up preview and the sober postscript.  We expect and often accept dramatic licence in films about historical events but to invoke, in prospect, ‘THE TRUE STORY’ and admit, in retrospect, that in this case that’s a relative term, is slippery.  Although we’re not meant to judge a film by its trailer, I think it’s not unfair to do so with Detroit.  Kathryn Bigelow could have chosen to include her disclaimer at the start.  Instead, she stages the horrors in and around the motel with a gruesome realism that’s designed to make the audience feel that what’s on the screen must be ‘true’.  Bigelow slips in her caveat as if as an afterthought – emotional and political mission already accomplished.

    There’s no argument that people involved in the Algiers Motel lockdown died or suffered bodily abuse and psychological damage, and that most of them were African Americans.  One of the people in the wrong place at the wrong time is Greene (Anthony Mackie), a Vietnam War veteran, whose presence serves as a continuing reminder that the blind pig gathering that sparked the riots was a welcome-home party for two black GIs back from Vietnam.   As well as sharpening the movie as a piece of history, the racial element also resonates with more recent cases of racist police brutality in the US and thereby achieves urgent political relevance.  (Perhaps unintentionally, Detroit carries an echo of censure too of the American invasion of Iraq:  the alleged snipers outside the motel are, according to the film, a chimera – a human equivalent of Saddam Hussein’s WMD.)  The racism in evidence is appalling and enraging both as a social phenomenon and in the detail of its physical consequences that Kathryn Bigelow graphically describes.  Yet the conspicuous cinematic technique of Detroit – the juddering hand-held camerawork and dynamic editing – is partly counterproductive.  The police interrogation in the motel occupies the bulk of the running time of this overlong (143-minute) film.   Like Christopher Nolan in Dunkirk, Bigelow aims to immerse the viewer in the action; as with Dunkirk, you’re so conscious of the director’s intentions that style threatens to dominate substance, especially since few of the characters emerge strongly as individuals.  They are, rather, figures in an extended, grim reconstruction.

    A signal exception to this is Philip Krauss (Will Poulter), the vilest and most vigorous of the three patrolmen – and a character who illustrates another weakness of the film.  Krauss subjects some of the suspects to mock executions so as to frighten others into confessing that they were snipers – this culminates in the death of Aubrey (Nathan Davis Jr), when Krauss’s less naturally aggressive colleague Demens (Jack Reynor) somehow misunderstands the rules of the ‘game’, and thinks he’s meant to shoot Aubrey for real.  Krauss is so much the focus of evil racism – and so dominant in the action – that, as not infrequently happens in racial dramas (The Help, for example), it’s a nasty individual rather than a social system that seems to be the problem.  Of course, a violent, verging-on-psychotic personality like Krauss often is the actual problem – the channel through which systemic viciousness is realised.  But Bigelow sacrifices context in favour of immediacy and the screenwriter Mark Boal (who also wrote The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty) supplies Krauss with a disproportionate number of lines.  It’s not Will Poulter’s fault that he’s too much but the emphasis on Krauss skews the moral picture – and the film’s political message.

    The most successful character in Detroit is Melvin Dismukes (John Boyega), the black security guard hired to protect a nearby grocery store during the rioting and who at first ingratiates himself with the police and other officers.  He has an advantage in that Dismukes is expected to be relatively quiet and watchful during the mayhem but John Boyega is such a strong presence that you almost wish Bigelow and Boal had told the story from the security guard’s point of view.  This would no doubt have created other difficulties – it seems that Dismukes’s actions in the motel are among the most disputed elements of what went on there – but it might have made for more complex drama.  After being identified as present in the Algiers by one of the young women (Hannah Murray) caught up in the incident, Dismukes is charged with murder and stands trial with the patrolmen.  Boyega is especially good in these post-motel scenes.  One of the film’s most telling and persuasive moments comes when, at the end of the trial, Dismukes leaves the courthouse and, with a mixture of disgust and relief, throws up in a corner of the street.  After doing so, he looks up anxiously, as if checking he’s not going to be arrested again – as a black man vomiting in a public place.

    There’s an inevitable lessening of tension once the horrors inside the Algiers Motel are at end.  This is a relief for the viewer but it’s hard to ignore the abrupt switch into a more conventional style of movie – as Bigelow describes the tragic aftermath for those directly affected and the bereaved families, the attitudes of police and judiciary, the incredulous reactions of the African Americans watching in the courtroom.   (The dialogue is presumably taken verbatim from the trial transcript.)  John Krasinski does a skilful job as the police officers’ defence attorney and Detroit is well acted generally but, except in the case of Dismukes, the script tends to be awkward whenever it aims for more than very basic characterisation.  This is true not just with Krauss but also with Larry Reed (Algee Smith), lead singer with the R&B group The Dramatics, who were in the motel during a visit to Detroit to try and seal a new recording contract.  That awkwardness is symptomatic:  Kathryn Bigelow is persistently uncomfortable in this film in negotiating between quasi-documentary and dramatic storytelling, and insists too much on the veracity of what she’s showing.  The final reality check on the afterlife of the characters is only to be expected.  More surprising and jarring is the insertion, as a brief entr’acte between the motel coverage and what came in its wake, of several black-and-white photographs of the Detroit Riot – proof positive, Bigelow seems to be reminding us, that her story is TRUE.

    5 September 2017

Posts navigation