It’s Brokeback Mountain transferred to the farm
derfully good. But so too – and very brave for taking on such an unsympathetic role – is the Australian actor Ben Mendelsohn, who plays the man she knew as Ray but who now goes by the name of Pete.
Be warned: the film – perhaps unsurprisingly – is heading somewhere pretty dark, but you can’t fail to be impressed by this cleverly constructed and brilliantly acted piece.
Stratton (15) ★ turns out to be an almost laughably bad thriller. As an M-like figure at the top of the British security services, Danish Gladiator star Connie Nielsen, looking like a retired supermodel and sounding as if she’s had accent coaching from Elizabeth Hurley, is one of the oddest bits of casting you’ll see all year.
That ruggedly handsome chap who almost ruined the operation at an oil refinery on the Strait of Hormuz? Ah, she explains instantly, that’ll be the legendary Grigory Barovsky (Thomas Kretschmann) of the Russian FSB, who everyone thought had been dead for 20 years but apparently not. In which case, the only person who can possibly stop him is John Stratton (Dominic Cooper) of the Special Boat Service. The plot really does unfold as unsubtly as that. At one point, even a handwritten letter is used to explain what’s going to happen next. God’s Own Country (15) ★★★ needs to come with a warning, given that the first five minutes include someone being sick, an internal examination of a cow and rough but consensual sex in the back of a livestock trailer. For a film that’s just got going, it’s decidedly full-on. But it’s worth sticking with if you liked Brokeback Mountain. Because this is basically Brokeback Mountain comes to Yorkshire.
Written and directed by Yorkshireman Francis Lee, it’s the story of Johnny Saxby (Josh O’Connor), a dour and spectacularly taciturn young man who’s watched miserably as his friends have gone off to college while he stays behind to look after the family farm after his father has a stroke. Small wonder, then that Saxby Jr numbs his frustrations with bingedrinking and casual sex… and he still hasn’t told his parents he’s gay.
So when a good-looking Romanian farm-worker comes along to help out… well, you can’t help feeling, one way or another, life is about to change.
Lee is a farmer’s son himself and I love how he captures the harsh quality of the Yorkshire landscape and the, at times, uncompromising agricultural detail.
But it’s a tough old watch that makes only the most modest concessions to commercial viability.