God's Own Country (Francis Lee)

[Stay Puft]

GOD'S OWN COUNTRY
Dir. Francis Lee

https://i.imgur.com/c7UqMa9.png

IMDb page (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt5635086/)

[Stay Puft]

Not a great film, but an impressive debut feature all the same. The narrative is a little wobbly, resolves too quickly and easily, using cliché as shorthand near the end. The film would have benefitted from a more developed final act, to fully earn its dramatic moments. That being said, I do appreciate the sentiment of the ending, and it's nice to see a film like this end like that.

The more impressive element of the film is in the finer details. The director evidently had his actors spend weeks living on a farm close to his own family farm, where he grew up, learning to do all the work that he himself had done. And then he filmed everything on that same farm, as the work needed to be done, with the actors doing the real work. Lee creates a compelling, documentary-like portrait of the day-to-day life of these characters, and his camera is frank and unwavering, leading to a lot of audibly uncomfortable reactions in my audience (this film will not be for the squeamish, or anybody who cannot handle the sight of dead animals). The strongest segment of the film is when the two characters are camping out together, mending a fence on the property, and tending to the sheep. Lee uses the work as a foundation to set the rhythm, establish character, and develop the attraction between the two characters. There is a wonderful simplicity and beauty to these scenes, and some adorable moments with a newborn lamb (one of the best animal appearances in a movie this year, up there with - if still a distant second to - the llama in Zama).

It'll draw a lot of comparisons to Brokeback Mountain, I'm sure, but it has little in common and shares much more with other similar British farm dramas of late, including Clio Barnard's Dark River, with which it shares many scenes (e.g. horse auctions) that are, hilariously, nearly identical.

[Peng]

A lot of conventional beats (which compared to its genre and its closest-in-logline film may make them unconventional in themselves), but infused with so many lived-in details and raw sensuality that the romance still becomes so compelling to watch develop anyway, alternating between rough intimacy and increasing bouts of tenderness. Josh O'Connor is astounding, a volcanic bundle of aggression and resentment that has to learn to live with himself over time, by opening up himself to another person. Some turns in the story are still a bit too conventional; the final big conflict before the third act is so played-out that it leans towards silly instead of stinging a bit. Even then, O'Connor still makes it watchable. And his last gesture and confession overcome being a cliche through his moving performance, and being a hard-earned endpoint of his character arc. 7.5/10