Strong Yorkshire brew with a bracing plot
THE divine country of the title is a bleakly beautiful stretch of West yorkshire, where Johnny Saxby (Josh O’Connor) works on the family sheep farm. Times would be hard even if his father (Ian Hart) hadn’t been crippled by a stroke.
As Johnny’s long- suffering grandmother, Gemma Jones has a role about as far as possible from The Duchess of Duke Street of blessed memory.
It’s another Seventies TV series that springs more readily to mind, however. But despite all the lambing and dry- stone walling, this is emphatically not the yorkshire of
All Creatures Great And Small. It’s more like Brokeback Fell, in fact, as Johnny — whose semi-repressed homosexuality has hitherto found an outlet only in rough no- strings encounters (including one at a cattle auction, of all places) — falls for Gheorghe ( Alec Secareanu), a dishy Romanian farm labourer hired by the Saxbys for lambing season.
Until he meets Gheorghe, Johnny is a mess; scarcely able to communicate with his family, drinking too much, and alienating even the few local friends he has with his chippy self-pity.
At first, he is no less obnoxious with Gheorghe, referring to him as ‘gyppo’. When Gheorghe snaps and knocks Johnny to the ground, physical contact is established.
Soon, a sexual relationship develops, but Gheorghe teaches Johnny that sex doesn’t have to be urgent and convulsive. Gradually, he becomes a less angry young man.
Gheorghe has been good for the farm in other ways, drawing on his background in rural Romania and asking the Saxbys if they have thought of making cheese from the sheep milk, which naturally they haven’t.
But his greatest influence is in making a more tender human being of Johnny, who in one moving later scene gives his blighted father a bath.
God’s Own Country, with its sparse dialogue and rather graphic depiction of gay sex, won’t be everyone’s cup of strong Yorkshire tea. Cinema and television alike usually romanticise farming, while this shows it in the raw.
But then that’s precisely why director Francis Lee, who was once an actor on Heartbeat, should be proud of his debut feature film. He grew up on a farm in these parts and apparently still lives half-way up a Pennine.
It shows. We are in the safe and doubtless calloused hands of a fine storyteller.