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.
