God's Own Country or Brokeback Yorkshire

I love the English. There's just something about that accent that turns my spine to custard. So it's no surprise that I love gay English movies. Maurice (1987), Beautiful Thing (1996), Weekend (2011), and Handsome Devil (2016) not only provide plenty of eye and ear candy, but there's something about how the emotionally reserved English tell stories about gayness that feels so poignant and vital.
You may add God's Own Country (2017) to that list.

GOC takes place in West Yorkshire where the only thing tougher than the topography and the accent is the people. Johnny (the lanky and somber Josh O'Connor) is right well fooked. He is trapped working on his family's struggling cow and sheep farm. His mother left the scene years ago and his dad is a grouchy, cane-wielding overlord (Ian Hart) taken care of by his hard-nosed Nana (Gemma Jones). And if all that's not bad enough, Johnny's in the closet. Not known for its thriving gay community, West Yorkshire is as much a prison for Johnny's heart as his body. In spite of all that, Johnny's not much of a sympathetic character.

The first glimpse we have of dear Johnny is him unloading last night's alcohol into the toilet. He's an asshole drunk who shouts like a bully and sulks like the world's worst teenager. With all the ardor of a dog in heat, he screws a local in a cow trailer- spit and shoves filling-in for romantic gestures. Johnny believes his love life to be as grim as everything else around him, so there is no chance that he will fall in love with these brief conquests. Until Gheorghe.

The family hires a Romanian immigrant to help with lambing season. Gheorghe (the striking Alec Secareanu) is a man of few words and a tender knack for birthing lambs. Johnny and Gheorghe are sent off to the far reaches of the farm to manage the flock and in no time, Johnny attempts his typical backroom style hook-up.

But Gheorghe will not be treated as a conquest and is powerful enough to force Johnny to let down his walls and let him inside. For the first time Johnny experiences soul-stirring passion with another man- but is there any hope for these two lovers in this place?

Directed by Francis Lee the film is beautiful in its bleakness and brevity. Images of touching and glances communicate more than any of the character dialogue. This unadorned quality leaves an air of fresh reality, with no grand speeches or orchestral flourishes to sweeten this difficult love story.

GOC came out in January, 2017 at the Sundance Film Festival and was overshadowed by the other big gay movie in the festival, Call Me by Your Name. GOC and CMBYN are interesting films for comparison. Where CMBYN feels like an inevitable romance in a rarefied Italian countryside, GOC is at times a painful struggle in an unforgiving landscape. What CMBYN hides in dialogue, GOC reveals in silence. Where CMBYN uses fruit allegory and eschews images of the object of desire, GOC strips down the male form unashamedly. Even though I think CMBYN sucked all the air out of the gay film room last year, it's great that the film industry is making such diverse views of gay life- and doing it so well. It has indeed gotten better.