God’s Own Country

It’s just about the great­est two-word line of dia­logue you could imag­ine. John­ny, our abra­sive, trou­bled, twen­ty-ish York­shire farmer, has just bug­gered some lithe young chap in a horse­box. No apolo­gies for using that word either, since this is an act of aggres­sion and dom­i­na­tion. Still, the vic­tim won­ders if ​‘we’ could go for a drink some­time, and gets a brusque slap-down for his pains. ​“No we” says John­ny, and at this stage in the pro­ceed­ings that sums him up precisely.

So far as fam­i­ly, friends and every­one else is con­cerned, he’s a scrunched-up ball of scorn, bit­ter at strug­gling to keep the farm a oat while his ail­ing old dad keeps telling him what to do. And Josh O’Connor’s com­pelling cen­tral per­for­mance gives it all to us unvar­nished and raw. Then we see him alone with one of the family’s cows. Soft­ly-spo­ken and gen­uine in his con­cern, even while he has a plas­tic-wrapped arm elbow-deep in her behind. Evi­dent­ly, there’s ten­der­ness lurk­ing with­in his gruff exte­ri­or, but will it ever emerge from behind the wall of bit­ter­ness he’s put up between him­self and the world?

Ten min­utes in, and with mas­ter­ly econ­o­my, first-time writer/​director Fran­cis Lee has set up a dra­ma of uni­ver­sal res­o­nance with­in a high­ly spe­cif­ic local land­scape. Fur­ther­more, there’s some­thing utter­ly arche­typ­al about the way a stranger enter­ing this envi­ron­ment proves the cat­a­lyst to move every­thing for­ward. Ghe­o­rghe (Alec Secare­anu) is a wily Roman­ian migrant, tak­en on as a hired hand, who’s a dab hand at lamb­ing, knows his way round a dry-stone wall, and, more impor­tant­ly, trans­mutes Johnny’s sex­u­al advances into some­thing a whole lot more sensual.

He might at first seem a bit too good to be true, yet in express­ing his nur­tur­ing instincts towards anoth­er man in a way which would nev­er have been pos­si­ble in his home­land, this wise trav­eller opens up whole new vis­tas for the emo­tion­al­ly closed-in pro­tag­o­nist. Indeed, what’s quite mag­i­cal here, is the way in which a lm so seem­ing­ly aus­tere and undemon­stra­tive in its washed-out colour and no-frills cam­er­a­work, uses spar­ing means – the pri­ma­cy of touch, a glint of sun­light, flow­ers on a kitchen table, the ecsta­t­ic drone of A Winged Vic­to­ry for the Sullen’s stealthy score – to con­vey the sud­den bless­ing of love. To show us and John­ny how its dizzy­ing, trans­for­ma­tive vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty, can bring life even more alive.

For all the ways in which the sub­ject mat­ter appar­ent­ly touch­es on very pub­lic issues (the econ­o­my of the land, LGBT rights, post-Brex­it atti­tudes), in essence the film is absolute­ly inti­mate and per­son­al, shaped by mar­vel­lous­ly believ­able per­for­mances and ulti­mate­ly achiev­ing a heart-rend­ing authen­tic­i­ty. Tak­ing char­ac­ters and audi­ence alike on a soul- stir­ring jour­ney, in British cin­e­ma terms, it’s sure­ly a throw­back to the era of auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal trilo­gies of Ter­ence Davies and Bill Dou­glas – films which start out with their feet on the ground yet reach to the heavens.

For fortysome­thing film­mak­er Lee, it’s an out­stand­ing achieve­ment, per­haps the strongest British dee­but since Lynne Ramsay’s Rat­catch­er. No doubt about it, there’s a lifetime’s craft, wis­dom and tears packed into this elo­quent state­ment of emo­tion­al and spir­i­tu­al possibilities.