Douglas Messerli | Farm Boys

farm boys

by Douglas Messerli

 

In the vast list of gay films these volumes explore there are relatively few that take place or even refer to gay life on the farm—as opposed to small town life or lakeside or seaside isolation or, yet another lonely world, that of the roaming North and South American cowboy. Yet the farm, particularly in the US and in various manifestations internationally, used to be perceived as the very definition of the common man. And it seems important, consequently, that if you wish to truly discover the heart of LGBTQ life, that films return time and again to those very most isolated outposts, the farm stereotypically dominated by the hardworking, determinedly heterosexual father

and his wife of true grit.

   For a young gay person growing up in this world, or even a late coming-out elder, the battleground that serves the very definition of homeland can seem, however, to be a fairly desolate place, where work defines life and sex is rarely available for sexual minorities. The landscapes in which these loners live and love is often beautiful, with skies that light up in in multiple colors and landscapes that offer themselves up to walking, dreaming, and pondering out one’s personal fate, but to find someone to love and, particularly, to be able to express that love in such a world is horribly difficult, often representing the loneliest and sometimes most tragic of gay experiences even in today’s more accepting world—as well as providing a lot of surprises to those who believe gay sex survives only in urban settings.

     Yet I can only name a handful of films I’ve seen that engage with these issues, although I am certain, now that I have perceived this as a minor of LGBTQ genre, that I shall certainly discover others; but to date I can only think of the examples of A. P. Gonzalez’s memorable Clay Farmers (1988), Mark Christopher’s truly revelatory short Alkali, Iowa (1995), Michael Burke’s strange and visually beautiful Fishbelly White (1998), and British director Francis Lee’s feature masterwork God’s Country (2017), all of films I have discussed previously in the years in which they first appeared.

      After I wrote those paragraphs, I indeed began discovering other such films. French director Pascal-Alex Vincent’s Far West (2003), Canadian director Bill Taylor’s Silver Road (2006), another film by the US director Mark Christopher, Heartland (2007), the Irish native Gaelic speaker Daithí Ó. Cinnéide’s Between Us (2016), US filmmaker Tyler Reeves’ It’s Still Your Bed (2019), Canadian Kahil Haddad’s Farm Boy (2019), French director Marine Levéel’s Magnetic Harvest (2019), yet another French cinema creator, Pierre Menahem’s Fire at the Lake (2022), and finally, Spanish master Pedro Almodóvar’s Strange Way of Life (2023) all are interesting films that make major contributions to this genre which I write about below.

       There have also been several feature films which I discuss separately about farming and rural communities and the difficulties people in those worlds suffer by Hungarian director Ádám Császi Land of Storms (2014), French filmmaker Olivier Peyon’s Lie with Me (2022), and Belgian director’s Lukas Dhont Close (2022).

       In nearly all of these films the children and adults of the farm community suffer for their long periods of hard work and isolation, trying to bring their sexual desires into the demands of the rural societies in which they remain, in some ways more restrictive than in even small towns, but in other situations allowing them far more independence simply because they are surrounded by unimaginative friends and family members who cannot even conjure a world of diversion and difference in which these LGBTQ figures privately endure.

 

Los Angeles, January 7, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2024).