Lilies Not For Me – first-look review

The prac­tice of con­ver­sion and aver­sion ther­a­pies marks a very dark chap­ter in the his­to­ry of West­ern med­i­cine. Sur­gi­cal, chem­i­cal and elec­tri­cal exper­i­ments being car­ried out on gay men held in psy­chi­atric insti­tu­tions with the inten­tion to alter their sex­u­al ori­en­ta­tion were com­mon­place in Britain all the way up to the mid-1970s. Bas­ing his fea­ture debut on the cumu­la­tive impact that these trau­mat­ic prac­tices had on queer peo­ple, Will Seefried adopts a painter­ly lens in his poignant drama­ti­sa­tion of this his­tor­i­cal wound.

Set in 1920s Eng­land, the sto­ry fol­lows Owen (Fionn O’Shea), a gay nov­el­ist who forms an unlike­ly friend­ship with Dorothy (Erin Kel­ly­man) a psy­chi­atric nurse who feels clos­er to a mod­ern-day ther­a­pist, pro­vid­ing emo­tion­al solace to Owen as he opens up about his rela­tion­ship with Philip (Robert Ara­mayo), a med­ical stu­dent who, con­vinced he has a ​“cure” for his ​“for­bid­den” feel­ings, talks Owen into a per­form­ing a risky, bar­bar­ic pro­ce­dure on his gen­i­tals. The arrival of a third man, Charles (Louis Hof­mann) com­pli­cates things between the two men even further.

The film effec­tive­ly jumps back and forth between these two time­lines, sharply con­trast­ing shad­ow and light; the hope­less­ness with­in the grey and dis­mal psy­chi­atric facil­i­ty and the ten­der inti­ma­cy and pas­sion con­tained with­in the warm­ly lit cot­tage, Owen’s pri­or res­i­dence (James Baldwin’s evoca­tive Giovanni’s Room being a def­i­nite source of inspi­ra­tion here in how the space is con­cep­tu­alised), pro­vid­ing a tact­ful bal­ance between pain and joy.

The cam­era always moves with inten­tion, whether it’s to cap­ture idyl­lic com­po­si­tions of the Eng­lish coun­try­side or tac­tile close-ups that linger to accom­pa­ny the often lyri­cal dia­logue – in one scene, Charles is seen devour­ing an orange which he describes being ​“like eat­ing the sun”. This tri­fec­ta of queer char­ac­ters also serves to remind audi­ences that queer­ness is far from a mono­lith or a stereo­type: Owen believes in his right to live free of shame, Philip adopts a much more cyn­i­cal approach opt­ing for sup­pres­sion, and Charles seems con­tent with liv­ing his truth in secret.

Anoth­er dis­cov­ery that the film­mak­er made while delv­ing into these trau­mat­ic his­to­ries was in Tom­my Dickinson’s book ​‘Cur­ing Queers: Men­tal Patients & Their Nurs­es’, which details the friend­ships that blos­somed between gay men and their nurs­es, many of whom recog­nised the bar­bar­i­ty of these so-called ​“treat­ments” and began to fight the sys­tem from with­in. With the sto­ries of Black nurs­es work­ing in health­care at the time being large­ly unknown, these par­al­lel his­to­ries become Seefried’s spring­board, inter­sect­ing in the form of an unlike­ly bond.

The pic­ture is beau­ti­ful­ly act­ed over­all, yet Dorothy feels more like a vehi­cle for expo­si­tion, and Erin Kel­ly­man isn’t afford­ed as much room as her male co-stars to dis­play her act­ing chops. Regard­less, this is a con­fi­dent debut, clear­ly exten­sive­ly researched, put togeth­er with great care and makes for a wel­come addi­tion to the canon of queer peri­od dramas.