Francis Lee | God’s Own Country / 2017

learning how to love

by Douglas Messerli

 

Francis Lee (screenwriter and director) God’s Own Country / 2017

 

Why is it, I felt Francis Lee’s 2017 film about a young, gay Yorkshire sheep farmer (Josh O’Connor) and a Romanian migrant temporary worker (Alec Secăreanu) to be totally believable and touching, whereas I found Ang Lee’s 2005 gay romance, Brokeback Mountain, about a gay relationship between two sheep-herders utterly unconvincing?

     It wasn’t that I was surprised by the sudden sexual passion between the two rugged Wyoming-based shepherds who get the hots for one another; as I wrote in my review of that year:

 

“The first part of the film, a long laconic testimony to the lonely life of the sheep-herding cowboys and an evocation of the beauty of the landscape in which they work, was perfectly reasonable. And I think it is not at all illogical or even out of the ordinary that these two lonely men, both of whom had come from dysfunctional families, would develop a kind of unspoken bond, even be attracted to one another, and, upon that lonely mountain, find themselves having sex. I don’t care how loud the Christian coalition’s yell, men—even straight men which both of these cowboys proclaim themselves to be—sometimes have sex in situations where they exist for long periods of time without women. So, their rather violent sexual outing—although we later suspect that it is not the first time for the Jake Gyllenhaal character, Jack Twist—is quite believable.”

     The central character of Francis Lee’s movie, Johnny, in this more nuanced work, begins also by presenting love with rough and quick sex, the young farmer grabbing up anyone he might encounter in his rural isolation for a quick fuck in the back of his van in which he carries his cows to market. His sexuality is clearly a thing of frustration and anger.

     The young lad with whom we first encounter him having sex tries to encourage a deeper connection through an invite for a drink at a local pub, which Johnny brusquely refuses. He is bitter, forced as he is to run his father, Martin Saxby’s farm since the elder has suffered a stroke and can now barely walk.

      His grandmother, Deidre (Gemma Jones), with her gorgon-like personality doesn’t help. Johnny is clearly locked up in a world not to his liking and which he has no chance to escape. His only outs are his drunken evenings at a nearby pub, after which he is apparently delivered up by a local taxi, whose driver is forced to literally deposit him, like a piece of rubbish, in the driveway of the farm, a scene which the temporary Romanian worker, Gheorghe, painfully observes from the small trailer near the house in which they have ensconced him.

      Johnny’s first encounter with Gheorghe, given the Yorkshireman’s unhappiness with his life, is not a pleasant one, although we immediately sense that the handsome Gheorghe, given his deferential attitude to life and his gentle responses to the brutal comments of his new employer and the conditions in which he must now live (including a dialect so peculiar that subtitles are needed), might be perfect to calm the angry young man. And that is, precisely, what makes this film so wonderful.

      Gheorghe, a bit like a saint of Pasolini’s Teorema, appears out of the blue in order to gradually tame the beast in Johnny, showing him, without saying a word, how beautiful his Yorkshire landscape truly is, that even a newborn baby sheep “runt,” might be nursed back to health—in one of the most painful but enlightening moments of this film, he takes up a knife to skin a stillborn sheep, placing the pelt around the runt, which when the dead sheep’s mother smells, encourages her to nurse it—and helps Johnny to learn that another male body is not just an ass to be intruded, but a being to caress and even kiss. Sheep are not simply something to be sheared, but produce, if you are knowledgeable, a beautiful cheese that is not only delicious but possibly financially beneficial.

     For the bitter Johnny, these lessons, particularly when he realizes that he cannot possibly bring his new lover into his house, are learned slowly. And when drunkenly and casually he chooses to fuck another young gay man in the local pub in the presence of his new “teacher,” Gheorghe determines, as the agreement has always been, to move on. The angel has flown off to Scotland.

      When Johnny’s father has another stroke, however, the son realizes that he must now take charge, and despite the dismissive stares of the gorgon grandmother, determines to find his Romanian lover and bring him home and, presumably, into his own bed.

       These events, large and small, are what make the love between these two unlikely gay lovers so very different from the other Lee’s simple-minded, lust-induced cowboys. We believe in this relationship because we can comprehend it; we understand what they do and don’t have in common and perceive how together they have worked to create something different, a world unthinkable in the Yorkshire wilds. In order to have a true relationship, you can’t just drop in from time to time on a married man to restore that “oh such special feeling”; you need to wake up, recognize yourself and your love and act on that.

      Francis Lee, unlike Ang Lee, using his own experience as the basis of his filmmaking, truly comprehended what love (any love, not just gay) is all about. And in a world in which gays are not yet accepted, you need to simply take a stand, bring the boy into the house and let him work with you to make a better life together. Even the gorgons will surely back off; besides Gheorghe is a much better cook! And that goat cheese he has left behind looks so very delicious.

 

Los Angeles, December 28, 2018 | Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2018).

Gregory Oke | Été / 2017

summer idyll

by Douglas Messerli

 

Gregory Oke (screenwriter and director) Été / 2017 [19 mintues]

The British director Gregory Oke, who made this film as part of his graduating requirement from New York University’s Tisch School of Arts, begins it with a blurred and distorted image from French television, which quickly reforms into an image of the lush Herefordshire green landscape where a young man, Rhys (Dan Patridge)—listening in his car to the music of French singer Jacques Dutronc while studying French from a tape—is working the summer as a sheep shearer.

     His fellow shearer, the handsome Freddie (David Burnett) knocks at the window, teasing his friend for his French obsession, reminding him that it is time to return to work. And throughout this 19-minute film there are several scenes altering between lunch breaks with the two working mates, their performing their shearing tasks, a bit in the macho rhythm and dance of director Claire Denis’ Beau travail (1999).

     Rhys is studying French not only because of his admiration of hip music sensation Dutronc, but his love of a young French woman, Emma (Rhiannon Handy) who is visiting England. The couple discuss Rhys’ traveling to France and staying in a local hotel while he visits her. And in one important long scene, they join Freddie, his girlfriend, and others on a beach picnic where Rhys seems to be playing games of balance in a culvert with Emma while his handsome friend and his girlfriend stare out moodily at the nearby stream, the one representing the trope of play, the other an image filmmakers love to flash before our eyes as a symbol of enduring love.

     But that is just the problem. As we glean from the brief lunch sessions and shearing episodes between the two males—all highly homoerotic—Rhys is unconsciously falling in love with his co-worker, observing the hair in his armpits, how his well-muscled body moves, etc.

     A drive in the country with Rhys and Emma seems about to spill over from a deep kissing session into a sexual incident, but Emma almost immediately perceives something is wrong, and when Rhys comes up for air it is clear to her that his outer actions do not match his inner emotions. Even he, becoming aware of it, sits moodily for a moment before attempting to make another go at it, she finally refusing and the two breaking off, she demanding her drive her home.

      No words are exchanged, no scenes of our confused young hero pondering the situation or even leaning into a closer relationship with the object of his sexual confusion. Rhys knows that despite Freddie’s good-natured, sometimes hands-on teasing, there is no hope for his growing sexual desires to be quelled. The only release between the two of them is through music, and this case the music of “outsiders,” Dutronc and his wife Françoise Hardy, representing the Francophone obsession of a British citizen.

      We come to learn of Rhys’ growing tension primarily through the richly-hewed, sensual, views of landscape and characters by director Oke, using a palette and lens closer to Luciano Visconti’s than to most other current younger filmmakers. And often his framing, with important elements visualized at the edges and corners of the image, help to reveal more about the meaning than the narrative at its center.

      Inevitably, during a night of drinking and pool playing at a local pub with friends, Freddie carries his good-natured joshing of Rhys too far, putting his arm around the boy in the toilet as he mocks a yawn, hinting of the breakup of Rhys and Emma. Soon after, the young sheep shearer explodes into violence, slugging the man he loves endlessly until Freddie wrestles him down the ground and back into reality. Rhys goes storming off as the others, shocked, stare after him, one describing him as a psycho.

      Back in his room, Rhys pounds the bed in despair. In the last scene he returns to music, his only outlet for sexual release, as his sings along in French, in karaoke-style, with his idol, Dutronc.

       Été is a beautiful and restrained film that reveals a remarkable talent for filmmaking that one hopes results in a feature film.

 

Los Angeles, July 6, 2023 | Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2023).

Ly Tran | Rose Canyon / 2017

the helpful neighbor

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ly Tran (screenwriter and director) Rose Canyon / 2017 [15.48 minutes]

 

Ly Tran’s gentle LGBTQ-friendly movie expresses a lovely tale about a young man having difficulty coping with life, but not because of his sexuality.

      Indeed, Rose Canyon seems to exist in an alternate universe that I never have experienced, but would be wonderful if it were true. In this world young men such as Oliver (Robert Charles) may be suffering over the sudden absence of a father, who evidently left this boy’s mother and him one day for another woman, simply packing his bags and leaving the house; but there are almost immediate healing forces of love that quickly arrive to help bring him back into everyday living.

      For the several days after his father has disappeared, Oliver’s mother has been laying in a near-catatonic state on the living-room couch. Her son, caring for her as best he can, has skipped school and retreated to his room for long periods of sleep and empty stares without expression into space. As the director represents it everything that might have drawn the mother and son up and out into the enjoyment of their home has disappeared. The closet is emptied of all but one garment. The dining room table and chairs sit eerily immobile like funereal forms in a darkly lit room; the patio furniture receives the rain and the glares of the sun as if it were ready to suddenly be taken over by rust. Suburbia never looked so gloomy.

      Evidently, the mother has communicated with a neighbor friend about what has happened since that woman’s son, Kai (Robert Mackey), appears suddenly at the door, ringing the bell and restoring a moment of hope for Oliver imagining that it is his father returned. When he encounters only a classmate come to share that day’s homework assignment you can see the instant when joy suddenly drains from his face.

      “My mom says you might be out for a few days, and I thought I’d drop by give you the homework....” Kai asks if Oliver is coming to school the next day, but the boy doubts it. A little oddly, Kai asks “When do you think you will?”

       Oliver’s response is vague to say the least: “I don’t know.”

       But Kai does not quite let up his pressure, suggesting he can come back and give him the assignments for as long as his classmate is out of school.

       The suffering boy tries to brush him off, turning and ready to close the door.

       But it is at this moment when “the helpful neighbor” story gets interesting, and slips its gears from being a more traditional “coming out” story.

       As the door almost closes Kai loudly clears his throat, Oliver reopening the door to hear what else he might have to say. “Sorry. I was wondering....I actually came here to tell you something. We’ve had a few classes together, and...a...I like you. As in...I have feelings for you. And I was wondering if some time you wanted to go out.”

      Oliver’s response is also somewhat unexpected: Oh!. Ahh. I mean, I mean, now’s probably not the best time.”

      The somewhat pushy Kai continues, “Would there be a better time?” a question that appears not to be asking precisely when they might get together but “if” there is a possibility of their “hooking up.”

       “I don’t know.”

       Kai immediately jumps in with specifics. “How about next week?”

       “Well, uhh, I just have a lot of things on my mind right now.”

       Kai almost accepts defeat. “Okay.  I guess I’ll see you later then.”

      But Oliver, recognizing what is in jeopardy, gives some way. “No...I...(bashfully smiling)...I’d like to. I just want to be alone right now though.” A long pause. “I’ll see you later, and thanks for the homework.” He closes the door.

      I’ve quoted this basically uneventful passage in full because it easily reveals something I have come to gradually realize about my reading of LGBTQ films. I now perceive that what most attracts me to these works, and what makes me interested in queer cinema in general is not just the fact that these works document queer activity or show personal interrelations between same-sex figures that are not readily available in the vast body of heterosexual normative worldwide film-making, but that in almost all of these works there is something also unusual or queer about the narrative, the writing, the characters, or the images they present.

     What interests me most about these works is not when they follow the general patterns of whatever genre of narrative into which they fit, but when suddenly something slips in the gears of that well-made work, when a scene that might have been naturalistically rendered suddenly moves into a highly theatrical mode or when, as in this case, the usual clumsy attempt to check out whether the boy you love might, in fact, be gay enough to like you as well. Unlike almost film I’ve encountered in the now nearly 3,500 works I’ve viewed, no previous film so easily presumed that possibility as does the 15.48-minute short, Rose Canyon. This must be one of the first times that queerness is expressed as simply the normal: “I have feelings for you.” Kai has utterly no difficultly and just a little reluctance in expressing what any straight kid might blather out to the neighborhood girl in a moment. And Oliver receives the news that he appeals to the other boy with an equanimity that is breathtaking. He’s ready and willing, just not at the calamitous moment in his life.

      Queer movies are not just queer in their subject matter, but even in their way of expressing what they have to say. They seldom behave as one expects—which of course might be argued about any truly interesting work of art—but are irresistibly attracted to the process of letting the gears of the plot or character slip to reveal that something else is going on, that somehow what is happening don’t quite work out the way one expects.

      This is particularly true of the Hollywood films that I have read as coded works; the reason they’re so obvious to a lesbian, gay, bisexual, or even sexually unsure person is that somewhere along the line of their smoothly running parts, a figure, a detail of story, a camera shot goes awry, does something no one might have imagined it doing. And if you look carefully at that moment you discover that the work probably is saying something else than it wants to, revealing another possibility of viewing what is happening on the surface. It’s much like “dropping a bead,” (see my essay “Dropping Beads” in the 1935-1939 volume of this series), letting out a little bit of information that only someone sensitive to of “clued into” it might recognize as expressing a greater truth than what it appears to say.

       In Rose Canyon the fact that absolutely nothing is hidden about Kai’s desires is what makes one take note. The boy wants to help his friend out of his funk and into his bed without even quite knowing why the other is suffering; and it appears he won’t let up until he succeeds in finding out the reasons for his pain or helps to effect that change.

       Kai shows up the next day with homework assignments in hand as well. This time it is clear that Oliver read his friend’s message quite easily the previous day. “I told you, I’m not really in mood for dating right now,” Kai responding, strangely cautiously, “We don’t have to be...dating. We could just hang out.”

     A slow grin comes over Oliver’s mouth: “If I go on a date with you, will you stop coming over?” This might represent the strangest acceptance of another’s sexual advances ever witnessed.

     How might Kai think about not taking up his offer. They go on a long walk where Oliver suddenly finds himself in Rose Canyon which as a child he evidently often visited with his beloved father. It is, so he discovers, one of Kai’s favorite places in which to contemplate and simply watch the sun go down, which they do together.

      The next stop is a large public artwork, presumably one of artist Robert Therrien's outsized pieces of furniture (or someone imitating him), in this case a large red chair upon which the two sit, as Kai further questions his friend about his problems, discovering that Oliver’s father has just abandoned him and his mother.

      Before the night is over, they wind up in Oliver’s bed, Kai waking up the next morning in a hurry to make it to school for a math exam. He tries to encourage Oliver to join him, but his new lover still refuses, preferring to suffer it out apparently for a while longer at home.

      Kai leaves and in the midst of his exam Oliver unexpectedly enters the classroom, as a large a smile crosses Kai’s face, realizing that he has helped his friend and won his love—amazingly without even the least bit of subterfuge.

 

Los Angeles, May 16, 2021

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (May 2021).

Stephen Cone | Princess Cyd / 2017

a princess exploring sex

by Douglas Messerli

 

Stephen Cone (screenwriter and director) Princess Cyd / 2017

 

As in most of Stephen Cone’s films, the central character of his newest film, Princess Cyd, is open—open to life and new experiences. She is young, and has the confidence of all young people, without  the fears and depressions of her elders. One might almost say that such a viewpoint is at the heart of most Cone films; although some of his figures, particularly the most religious of them, seem trapped in their lives, most of his characters seem to simply not yet have made up their minds of whom they like and what they believe. The young pre-college and college students of his films are simply and openly “searching,” seeking out what most of us have forgotten: who they are, what they want to believe, and where they may be going later in their lives. There is an open freshness, accordingly to Cone’s films, wherein young people simply are allowed to explore their options without adult or even peer judgment, and, as such, his films appear almost as a tonic in a world of fictions, films, and other works that determinedly deposit specific viewpoints, however much they might attempt to hide them as open possibilities. In Cone’s films, characters move in directions you might never have imagined or even approved of. His figures don’t yet have answers, or, even if they do, as in Princess Cyd’s older aunt, they are still open to new options.      

     Cyd is not princess, despite her open assertion of just such a position, but a young girl, who has, perhaps, given her mother’s early death and her father’s apparent depression, been treated as a kind of princess, a blonde soccer girl, comfortable in her own body, even if she is perhaps rather intellectually lacking. As she immediately declares to her award-winning writer aunt, “I don’t read.” The somewhat pained aunt has long ago lost touch with her niece, fuzzily explained by the girl’s relationship with her difficult father and her mother’s death by murder years earlier, who grew up in the house where her aunt, Miranda (Rebecca Pence) still lives. There is clearly been some deep resentment between both the aunt’s and Cyd’s father, but, as in most of his films, Cone does not center his narrative on sins of the past, nor even the problems that might be central to his characters. 

     Miranda is a liberal, even if she is clearly seeking spiritual salvation, and she simply swallows her pride in her own writing career in welcoming into her house this young, rather rambunctious sports girl, who is as equally at home in her own body and beliefs as Miranda is in her more ritualized life. Cyd (Jessie Pinnick) is, in some senses, a kind of smart-aleck girl, who obviously doesn’t easily take to adult auditing. And fortunately, Miranda’s tolerant acceptance of her for a summer, works out nicely, almost too predictably, into a friendship which will help enlighten both of them.

       It’s not that Cyd doesn’t challenge her, or that Cyd’s careless behavior doesn’t make it difficult for Miranda to deal with her new young charge. Cyd is impolite, interruptive of the careful life Miranda has cultivated. But Cone, never a director who judges his characters, gently puts the issues out before us, sometimes perhaps a bit too correctly, allowing both to work on a kind of assimilation that helps both of them and regenerates their lives. Cyd actually begins to read, Miranda questions her more conservative values, including the fact that her spiritual search as clearly taken up to replace any sexual encounters. 

    Cyd challenges these, suggesting she seek out the company of a dear black friend who is part of Miranda’s literary salons. And Miranda pushes back with an explanation that sex is not everything, while Cyd herself explores an entirely new world, given her rather previously undeveloped friendships with males, with a trans-sexual figure, Katie (played by Malic White, an individual who has since described herself as being trans-sexual), wearing a stylish Mohawk haircut, and with whom Cyd immediately falls in love.

       Yet, where most directors might present these issues as a kind of polemic, resolved perhaps with mutual growth in both the opposing figures, Cone’s characters are never really oppositional. They listen to one another, and, yes, they both grow in the process, but don’t necessarily change completely from their original selves. Rather, as in nearly all of Cone’s films, they simply adapt to one another, learning from the people around them, listening—just as we are made to listen to their different points of view.

       In this new film, Cone sometimes doesn’t quite get his generous points of view right, intruding, it seems to me, with a slightly dominating male intrusion and some rather sanctimonious scenes regarding Cyd’s and Katie’s odd relationship. Yet his characters maintain their ground. We might simply say, that just like the young boy in Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me by Your Name, Cyd is simply comfortable, like so many young people today, with experimenting with love, trying out things the previous generation were far too timid to peruse. This is not truly a “queer” movie any more than was Guadagnino’s lovely film, but both works reveal an openness to sexual differences. We can only hope that what we see in these films is true, an acceptance of sexuality in a way that is so very contrary to my own generation and that of Miranda’s.

      If nothing else, filmmakers like Cone and Guadagnino represent something new, graceful and charming in a way we might never have imagined. Perhaps in the near future, we can even stop characterizing films such as Princess Cyd and Call Me by Your Name as gay or lesbian. They are simply tales of young people exploring sex.

 

Los Angeles, February 18, 2018

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (February 2018).

Amara Cash | Out of the Closet / 2014

back into the closet

by Douglas Messerli

 

Amara Cash (director) Out of the Closet / 2014 [5 minutes]

 

Damien Diaz and Daniele La Leggia are the arguing gay couple in this truly amateurish short film by Amara Cash.

     The two have been having a hot relationship which we know through the tropes running through the flashbacks that possibly could be fitted into a five-minute narrative: running at the beach, riding a Ferris-wheel together, picnicking on the Santa Monica, Los Angeles promontory, and, occasionally kissing and rolling around in bed.

    But today on Damien’s visit, Daniele evidently has not time for him. Evidently he doesn’t feel the freedom to openly come out since he’s Italian and he lives 20 minutes away from the Vatican. Moreover, he’s about to get a leg up Hollywood through a new script he’s written, and he’s not going let Damien fuck it up.

     Finally, he has forgotten to tell Damien: he has a new fiancée, Victoria, who will be visiting him at any moment. Desperate to silence his suddenly ex-boyfriend, he shoves Damien into the closet of his bedroom and locks the door.

     In short, no one is out of the closet in this work. Even if Damien has fought his own father for his freedom, he has now been recloseted by his boyfriend, now clearly former boyfriend. And by film’s end he can’t even open the bedroom door to escape.  

     Poundingly bad music is used to create a sense of drama since neither of these young men can act and the dialogue, moreover, presumably written by Cash (no screenwriter is listed) is so embarrassing that it’s no surprise when at one point in the YouTube version online the sound goes mute. No need to explain what’s going on. That was established in the very first few minutes. This is a toxic situation that Damien should have immediately run from just as the viewer should have turned away from the screen.

      But then, given the political situation these days, perhaps this little vignette, no matter ineffectual, has shown us the future of the queer world.

 

Los Angeles, September 17, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2025).

 

Elliot London | 306 / 2010

working his way through school

by Douglas Messerli

 

Elliot London and Gregory Phelan (screenplay), Elliot London (director) 306 / 2010 [10 minutes]

 

In its promotional statement on IMDb and other such services, this short film directed by Elliot London claims to explore what is normal in one’s life. Or rather, who is normal. Its example is a student, Eric Hays (Brian Estel), who evidently works at a bar most nights, begging a friend to take his shift for the evening.

    As he showers and shaves, dresses up in a suit and enters an apartment hallway, we can easily guess that his alternative job that evening is as private call-boy. He enters the suite of an older man, (Scott Lynch Giddings) who serves him a glass a sherry before Eric stands, strips away his tie and shirt to be momentarily fellated by the older man before he quickly and quite forceable pushes Eric to the couch and fucks him, handing him a towel to clean off before taking a quick exit, all of this without a word.

 

    The music-laden film (with a heavily-influenced score by Debussy, posing as new work evidently by Mark Chiat) hints at a shocking twist: Eric returns home and after a long shower, moves into the bedroom where a woman (Raquel Houghton), the Sam of an earlier refrigerator door clue is asleep. He gives her a kiss.

   I suspect the scripters and director imagined we might be shocked, asking as they do: “Who is Eric Hays? Or more specifically: What is Eric Hays hiding?”

    Frankly, there’s absolutely no evidence that he’s hiding anything. And moreover, there are hundreds of such male prostitutes who claim not to be gay and live with a woman, often out in the open. Such relationships have been the subject of so many queer films that it seems as if the vast majority of young men working as male-on-male sex workers claim to be heterosexuals off the clock. Polish director Wiktor Grodecki’s trilogy Not Angels But Angels (1994), Body Without Soul (1996), and Mandragora (1997), among many other such films, long ago established that boys and men doing sex for hire general don’t prefer to be described as being gay.

     If London means to surprise us he should have watched a few dozen films about the subject for embarking on his own work. Moreover, as a commentator named “Johnny” on Letterboxd argues: “If the absence of dialogue was an intentional artistic choice, it needed to be counterbalanced by a more daring visual or conceptual approach. Instead, 306 opts for safety: clean visuals, minimal risk, and ultimately, little emotional impact.”

     This film has some lovely cinematographical moments, particularly when Eric is being wined and fucked, but it has hardly anything else to offer us. No news here, and most definitely no surprises.

 

Los Angeles, September 17, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2025).