A Brokeback Mountain for the Yorkshire Moors
God’s Own Country 15 cert, 104 min
‘Let people feel the soul and the heart there,” austere French director Robert Bresson once advised aspiring acolytes, “but let it be made like a work of hands.”
God’s Own Country, the superb debut feature from Francis Lee, the 47-yearold English filmmaker, could slip seamlessly into Bresson’s bristlingly tactile world.
Lee’s picture keeps a watchful eye on its characters’ hands at all times. For a start, they’re what they work with, up on the West Riding of Yorkshire’s wind-hammered moors. But they’re also often their best means of self-expression, for all the times when words fall hopelessly short.
Gheorghe (Alec Secareanu), a handsome Romanian farmhand who arrives in the area for the lambing time, isn’t much of a talker. But the way he gently rubs life into the tiny, bleating bundles of wool and mucus he pulls out into the world doesn’t require much verbal explanation. Nor do the far surlier efforts made by Johnny Saxby (Josh O’connor), the 24-year-old son of the ailing middleaged sheep farmer (Ian Hart) whose estate Gheorghe comes to work on.
What complicates matters is the fact that Johnny is actively gay, as an early sequence set at a cattle market makes strappingly apparent. Fumbled encounters in livestock trailers are all well and good, but the idea that one of them might lead to a date, of all things, is beyond the pale.
You can probably see where this is going even if you haven’t seen Ang Lee’s adaptation of Annie Proulx’s gay cowboy story Brokeback Mountain –a film to which God’s Own Country owes an immediately obvious debt. Johnny is suspicious of Gheorghe as soon as he collects him from the station – he calls him “Gypsy” in a tone of voice that’s not obviously affectionate.
But when they camp out close to the flock in a long-deserted cottage, the gently poaching tension between them ramps up to a rolling boil, and their hands soon find other things to grasp at than animals. The sex scenes are muddy and vigorous – but are also struck through with the same flinty, unsentimental beauty as the terrain.
O’connor portrays Johnny’s steady maturation here with extraordinary delicacy and deftness, while Secareanu brings wells of unspoken feeling to what could have easily been a flat-pack heart-throb role, and the two actors’ chemistry is grapefruit-sharp. The film has a cumulative power, and a twilit afterglow that hasn’t faded yet.