Carmen Emmi | Plainclothes / 2025

in the name of the father

by Douglas Messerli

 

Carmen Emmi (screenwriter and director) Plainclothes / 2025

 

One might describe Carmen Emmi’s new feature film, Plainclothes, as a kind of soap opera of hysteria. And why shouldn’t it be when a man who believes in law and order suddenly finds himself trolling a Syracuse mall men’s bathroom in the late 1990s, long after larger urban areas had ceased such kinds of surveillance after Stonewall and the worst of the 1980s and early 1990s AIDS epidemic had subsided, in order to arrest queers for public indecency, not only sending offenders to prison for years at a time but revealing their often closeted gay sexuality to their families and neighbors?  

      For the good-looking young Lucas (Tom Blyth) it’s even worse since he joined the police force under the influence policeman grandfather never imagining that he would be assigned this kind of work; and doubly painful since he himself is beginning to realize that he too is gay and is attracted to at least one of the generally older married men he tempts into the bathroom so that his partner can lock them up in handcuffs and speed them off to police headquarters for questioning.

      If, on one level, it is simply the fact that the job is ugly and demeaning, requiring him to scout out the open mall tables and benches for a possible target (strangely, the police seem to require their lures to possess “gaydar”) and then, after eye contact, watch him head off to the bathroom, take up residence in a bathroom stall, and reveal himself through the door he opens to welcome the cute undercover cop to join him in sex within, for Lucas it is even worse since he cannot help but sympathize with some of his offenders.

    It is the slightly elder, gray-haired Andrew (Russell Tovey) who finally leads him to cross the line, actually entering the stall and joining in sexual concourse. In this case, however, the zipper to his coat, which Andrew eagerly attempts to strip off him, gets stuck, ending with Lucas quickly turning tail and indicating to his partner Ron (Christian Cooke) that their attempts at arrest are a no go; but not before Andrew has slipped Lucas a piece of paper with a message and phone number.     

     The critic-editor of The Queer Review, James Kleinmann nicely captures that moment, writing on its role in the film as a whole:

 

“We learn that the undercover protocol means that Lucas is not allowed to go into a bathroom stall with his targets, so when he does so with Andrew we know that it is a bold step, putting his lust ahead of duty. Although nothing happens physically between them during that first encounter, the sexual tension is palpable and every subsequent scene between the two characters—clothed or otherwise—is piping hot and Blyth and Tovey’s on-screen chemistry is magnetic. Emmi strikes a refreshingly neutral tone when it comes to tea-rooming—or cottaging as it is known in the UK—and despite Lucas’ own lingering discomfort with being queer, and the police force’s condemnation, there is no sense of authorial judgement, or sensationalism, about public restroom sex between men.”

 

      But as Kleinmann mentions, that is not to say the Syracuse Police Department are non-judgmental. Even worse than their previous use of young males as baits, they retreat to an even more insulting and intrusive method of filming the men coming and going in the bathroom, not only applying the same methods famously used in 1962 by the Mansfield, Ohio police, available now for all of us to see and suffer through the brilliant recontextualization of that event by William E. Jones, who issued a slightly edited version of the original surveillance tapes, mostly keeping them in tack, but bragging about technical advances since.

    Even worse for Lucas is his inability to resist his attraction to the handsome silver-haired Andrew, meeting up with him in an old movie palace that mostly shows reruns, but has an almost multitudinous space for possible gay sex. Yet even here, because of the rookie gay boy’s fears, no sex occurs, despite one of the most remarkably well-kept spaces possible outside of the absolutely decaying pornhouse theater of Mexican director Julián Hernández’s Raging Sun, Raging Sky (2009) or singer John Duff’s inhabitation of a mall cinema in Girly (2018).

    The two males of this film come together physically in an unattended greenhouse located in a public park, wherein director Emmi mixes their sexual possibilities with the artificiality of the floral world in which they plan to luxuriate in sex. But even here, as close to nature as these men get, Andrew is interrupted by a telephone message from his wife, and we see remembered glimpses of their actual sexual feast—wherever it transpired—only in the midst of a holiday family celebration at which Lucas almost has a private breakdown in the basement from his pent-up emotions and terror of discovery, particularly given the presence of his homophobic uncle Paulie (Gabe Fazio) who Lucas’ mother (Maria Dizzia) has invited to live with them after he has been thrown out of his own home upon the discovery that he was cheating on his wife.

    Much of the tension in this film is created by the jostling between Emmi’s use of the standard 16.9 format with the older 4:3 mm camera which creates a growing sense of claustrophobia. Yet, like Kleinmann, I find much of the camerawork, despite it jarring affects, often too distracting, particularly since he also alternates time, slowing down some moments and speeding it up at the next, so that it is hard to deduce, the chronological logic of when Andrew’s and Lucas’ special one-time meetup occurs in relationship to Lucas’ father’s death and the various holiday celebrations he attends in his working class family home. All we do know is that when Lucas first makes phone contact with Andrew, it is soon after the policeman’s father’s death, Lucas taking on the name of his father Gus in response to the older man’s desire to know his would-be lover’s name.

     In the meantime, a great many important events occur. For one, even after the two have had their one-time sexual meetup, Lucas believes he spots Andrew again heading to the mall bathroom, this time after the police have set up their cameras behind a two-way glass wall. In order to save his friend from being arrested, Lucas hurries into the men’s room before him, gains entry into the camera space where his partner is now filming, and attempts to interfere with the shoot. Forced by his irritated partner to himself put the cuffs on the suspect, presumably caught on camera nonetheless, Lucas discovers that the new prisoner is a mere lookalike to Andrew. But his actions, reported to his superiors, forces them to temporarily relieve him from his job due to what they assume has to do with his father’s recent death. By this time, however, Lucas realizes he can no longer play the role, even after a short hiatus, and openly quits his job.

     But even that act does not allay his problems. Desperate for further contact with the man who represents his first love, he tracks him down through his license plate to a suburban church, only to discover that Andrew not only also has children, but he is the minister of the church. Still, Lucas attempts to beg him to join him in a relationship; but by this time in his life Andrew not only has determined to forever remain in the closet, but prefers it that way so that he can remain with his family and familial vocation (his father founded the church).

     In one of the earliest scenes in the film, Andrew visits his home with a letter addressed to Gus deep in his pocket which somehow slips out into a snowbank. We cannot yet comprehend his desperate attempts to find it. But by the last scene of the film, the celebration of his mother Marie’s birthday, he returns home to find her and her brother Paul hunkered down in the bedroom, the mother overcome with grief. Paulie has evidently found the letter and shared its contents with Marie, a final message of love and exculpation from someone named Andrew, suggesting that her husband was secretly homosexual.

     We share the truth of that letter with the man who was its actual recipient. But despite his mother’s shock Lucas is still not ready to come out to his conservative mother, particularly since, now without a job he now plans to return home to live for a while. He attempts to comfort his mother, reminding her of how much his father loved both of them, while Paulie maliciously comforts his seemingly “straight” nephew by declaring that he always suspected his brother-in-law was gay, the way he smiled all the time, kept things close to his chest, and tended to the birds. His smug and absolutely wrong assumptions finally infuriate Lucas enough that he begins to physically fight with his uncle, ultimately throwing him, quite literally, out of the dining room window in front of his entire family and friends, before admitting that the letter was not written to Gus, his father, but to him. The startled faces of the frieze of family and friends is relieved by the slightly proud smile that comes to his mother’s face. Her husband, after all, has been loyal to her and her son honest to himself.

     One of the things Andrew had written in that letter was that it he hoped it isn’t too late for his young lover to choose a different life from the closeted one he had determined for himself. And now through his actions Lucas has actually freed himself from the more terrifying revelations that might have been necessary had he continued to live his life as a closeted man and had actually married his live-in girlfriend Emily (Amy Forsyth). When enough gay men openly declared their sexuality and demanded to no longer be seen as perverted beings inhabiting an obscene underworld of secret meeting places, such absurd attempts to criminalize gay sexuality seemingly ended.

     But this film, occasioned, in part, so Emmi claims by a recent 2016 lewd-conduct sting, reminds us that as long as LGBTQ lives are perceived as abnormal and dangerous by any body of conventionality, be it governmental or smaller local hate groups, gay men are not safe, particularly those who are married or in family situations where they dare not reveal their existence and have nowhere else to find others for sexual release but in public spaces.

     With the ever-determined Trump and Maga attempts to turn the public against various elements of the LGBTQ community and the determined erosion of our rights, moreover, we might see this film as a wake-up call to the horrors of what many gay men might once again have to face in the next few years.

 

Los Angeles, August 23, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (August 2025).