God’s Own Country
(UK, 104 min.)
Written and directed by Francis
Lee
Starring: Josh O’Connor, Alec
Secareanu, Gemma Jones, Ian Hart
 |
| Pacific Northwest Pictures |
I don’t know if “ramming” is a
thing, but let’s use it as a verb since there’s a whole lotta rough play with
sheep and men in God’s Own Country. There’s
ample ramming between Johnny (Josh O’Connor) and Gheorghe (Alec Secareanu) in
the muddy and ragged Yorkshire countryside during one week of unexpected love
and profound revelations. Quick fucks and tough love ensue in this restrained
and thoughtful love story as God’s Own
Country gives an unsentimental yet moving tale of desire. This film by
writer/director Francis Lee takes place in the quiet grey farmland of
Yorkshire, and it owes a debt to Brokeback
Mountain with its rugged portrayal of newfound love between two men.
Johnny clearly has issues when God’s Own Country begins with the lad
waking up visibly hung over and vomiting violently into the toilet. His mum
(Gemma Jones) insists that she isn’t cleaning his sick up “again” while dad
(Ian Hart) rolls his eyes at Johnny and tells his disappointment of a son to
get a move on. Johnny moves slowly around the family farm, partly because he’s
recovering from the previous night of hard drinking and partly because he is so
detached and withdrawn from his surroundings. He isn’t out to his parents and
he isn’t entirely honest with himself as evidenced through his drunken escapes.
God’s Own Country show Johnny struggle through a dull routine of drinking,
vomiting, struggling, and screwing up. He can’t complete simple tasks on the
farm. When he gets the chance to leave the family farm, his mind is on rough
and anonymous casual sex, like blowing and ramming a veterinarian (Harry Lister
Smith) at the auction where he aims to sell some livestock. Johnny isn’t one
for sentimentality, as his cold rebuff of the young man shows shortly after
their brusque tryst in a trailer.
O’Connor keeps the audience at a
distance in the film’s first act with his quiet, brooding, and anxious
performance. Johnny wears his confusion and sense of alienation like a gruff
and surly cloak. It’s hard to be out, open, happy, and secure in such a small
and isolated town, particularly when his parents are so puritanical in their
approach to love and labour. He’s more like a lodger earning his keep than a
son welcome in his own home, and O’Connor’s quietly affecting performance that rewards
patience with this difficult character.
Johnny adopts a sunnier hue when Gheorghe
arrives at the farm as a hired hand. This Romanian migrant worker piques
Johnny’s interest—maybe it’s his eyes or his exotic charm—but Johnny keeps up
the same standoffish behaviour. He masks his interest with racist slurs and
classist putdowns.
God’s Own Country inspires Johnny to explore new terrain when he
and Gheorghe ship off for a few days to deliver and raise some sheep offsite.
Sleeping in close quarters and left with nobody but one other for contact, the
isolation of the countryside invites intimacy. Lee draws upon the physicality
of Johnny and Gheorghe’s passion with their first encounters emphasizing cuts,
scrapes, spit, and mud. Their relationship begins randomly, but develops
quickly and tenderly.
The Yorkshire countryside is a
powerful figure in the film as the damp masculine setting of muddy fields, rickety
barns, and rolling hillsides evoke the conservatism of the small town, and the
pulls of escape and freedom invited by the private space the men find while
tending the sheep. When Johnny finally unlocks himself to this stranger, Lee
opens the landscape to the young men as Johnny and Gheorghe take in the
expansive and rugged beauty of the English countryside and the endless sense of
possibility it invites with comforting hills that roll into the distance. Other
subtle touches, like Gheorghe intimately dousing salt all over Johnny’s food,
let God’s Own Country offer a smart,
down to earth romantic drama that challenges conventional ideas of masculinity
with this tender story. The film intimately connects the land and its people,
and this tale of rams and men shows that love exists in the most unexpected
places.
God’s Own Country opens Friday, November
3 at TIFF Lightbox and it screens at Ottawa’s Inside Out fest on Nov. 10.