Movie Review: God's Own Country (English)

Romance is generally not my thing, at least at the movies. But imagine my surprise when I found myself tearing up, then crying my eyes out, as Johnny and Gheorghe (played exceptionally by Josh O'Connor and Alec Secareanu) find their way around each other, steal subtle glances, speak unspoken emotions, fall in love and eventually realise happiness for them means being there for one another.

An almost-poetic, heart-wrenching tale of love and tenderness from first-time director Francis Lee, God's Own Country, set in the rugged, rural landscape of Yorkshire, offers a startlingly intimate portrait of a loner who finds himself trapped, almost landlocked (both metaphorically and geographically), suffocating him to such an extent that all he does is drink, drink, drink, and find comfort in casual gay sex with strangers.

After all who could blame Johnny? All his friends have gone off to university, and here he is, stuck, begrudgingly forced to take over the family's farming business when a stroke left his widowed father (a terrific Ian Hart) paralysed and bound to a wheelchair. The work is backbreaking, unforgiving, and he wears a perpetual sullen look, unsure of what the future holds for him - all the more reasons why the intensely physical random encounters and the sexual release become his only escape, his catharsis.

Things however change when Gheorghe arrives to help him out during the lambing season. Strikingly handsome and an immigrant from Romania, he proves to be not only resourceful, gentle and competent (not just because he is older), he awakens in Johnny a primal instinct that blurs the line between aggression and softness. The rough, mud-spattered sex they indulge in paves the way for something deeper, and Johnny slowly finds himself opening up, and in ways he hadn't experienced before.

While God's Own Country's inevitable comparison to Ang Lee's gay epic Brokeback Mountain is understandable, Lee's attention for pastoral detail (coupled with Joshua James Richards' stunning camerawork) and his appreciably franker depiction of homosexuality makes it a refreshing watch. That the film is less about the possibility their relationship might be threatened by exposure and persecution and more about the bitter, existential questions they have to face if they are to lead a life together only adds to its realistic charm - an indication of how times have changed and that this love, which was once forbidden and frowned upon, is as undeniable as nature itself.