God’s Own Country **** (2017, Josh O’Connor, Alec Secareanu, Gemma Jones, Ian Hart) – Movie Review

Up on Yorkshire’s version of Brokeback Mountain, there’s trouble and strife (though no wife) on the sheep farm.

Young sheep farmer Johnny Saxby (Josh O’Connor) takes to binge drinking and close encounters with men in casual sex, as his dad succumbs to a stroke and Johnny and grannie (Gemma Jones) are forced reluctantly to take on Romanian migrant worker Gheorghe Ionescu (Alec Secareanu) for the spring lambing season when he turns up looking for work.

One thing leads to another, like it does, and push comes to shove, and…

Things have changed since Brokeback Mountain. Astoundingly, 12 years have gone by. In Britain, or at least in the movies, we have grown up, got franker, stronger, more positive, more optimistic. Boy, do we need this film now!

Writer-director Francis Lee’s intense film is very persuasive and winning. It is full on emotionally and sexually when it feels it needs to be, and feels entirely credible and almost documentary-style real. If it doesn’t persuade you these two blokes need to end up together, hopefully happy ever after, you have no romance or feeling in your soul.

All four performances are raw, real and impeccable, so strong and searing that they hurt. It is a real acting feat for the actors, because there is mostly little dialogue and it often plays like a silent movie. So it’s all in the facial and bodily expressions, and there are plenty of those, often painfully expressive.

The boy meets boy story could be just a Mills and Boon thing, but – it isn’t! It’s an honest, decent and true thing, thanks to all the atmosphere and details feeling just right. The lads get in there in the mud and the animals, and the film pulls you in with them.

The locations and photography are the other main characters in the film, set in cold comfort farm. They are commendably dreary, downbeat and depressing. But not so the film. It is full of life, quirky, tricky, difficult life, admittedly, but real life.

There is a good reason that it is all so personal and so real: the director was born on his family’s farm in Soyland, West Yorkshire. The heroic Romanian migrant worker idea makes it an anti-Brexit movie, another icing on the cake.

© Derek Winnert 2016 Movie Review

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