Review: Francis Lee, God’s Own Country, 2017

A Queer Kind of Redemption in a Broken Landscape

*Contains spoilers*

Yorkshire born writer and director Francis Lee has crafted a starkly beautiful poem of a film. It is a queer romance between a young farmer, Johnny Saxby, and a Romanian migrant worker, Gheorghe Ionescu, set on a struggling farm in the Pennines with Johnny’s disabled father and long-suffering Nan. Rich in allusion and metaphor, it is also a film about family, loneliness and belonging. Starting in a dark and troubled place it opens up into a quietly optimistic story about the redemptive nature of love and lambing, and the joy of cheese-making…

Francis Lee’s pictures remain in my head. A single magpie trapped in a cage; a hen pecking at her broken egg; Nan ironing, the pyjamas of her stroke-stricken son spread out on her ironing board like his limp body. This is a film about men and masculinity, but the women are always there even in their absence. Nan is the only consistent female presence throughout; her life is measured out in laundry baskets, emotionally and physically exhausted by keeping her menfolk in clean clothes and fed on home slaughtered chicken stew. She doesn’t appear to ever go into Keighley for a coffee morning or a Bingo night. She certainly isn’t up on a hilltop doing Tai Chi with Helen Mirren as in Calendar Girls. For one moment she allows herself a tight-lipped hum whilst pegging out the clothes, only for near tragedy to strike a moment later. When the charming Gheorghe enters their world she is caught between relief that her grandson has finally found a “nice boy”, exasperation at the extra cleaning up and laundry this now entails, but also, she intimates a silent fear that this new love could be the end of the farm and the family if it entices Johnny away. “He’s here to work,” she stresses. As for the missing mothers, they are mentioned once then never again, but their absence lingers. Gheorghe’s mother teaches English in Romania, he tells us, explaining that this is why he can understand whatever it was Johnny’s dad just said about sheep and the fell (when I, a native English speaker who has lived in Yorkshire for twenty years, couldn’t quite catch it…) “Fancy,” says Nan, but doesn’t follow it up. (Nobody ever follows up any of Gheorghe’s attempts to share anything about his life, I notice.) Johnny Saxby’s mother ran away – without her son – to be a hairdresser, unable to bear another winter of hilltop isolation with her husband’s dour family. The simplicity of the central love story is only surface deep. Underneath are complex hidden histories that are both personal and culturally significant. Gheorghe says he has left Romania because his country is dead, but he has arrived in another place of “spectacular desolation”, of closed down mills and demising farms, as Ted Hughes described the area in his preface to The Remains of Elmet. 

On the Film Programme Lee talked about the influence on God’s Own Country of Fay Godwin’s photographs, which had inspired and accompanied Hughes’ poems, and the poem “These grasses of light/Which think they are alone in the world” particularly resonated here for me.

With its handheld camera in close-up on these rocks and grasses and wind-chidden faces, the soundscape replacing language to evoke the beauty and the cruelness of a West Riding April, Lee’s film also reminded me a little of Andrea Arnold’s Wuthering Heights. It is a landscape full of the ghosts of damaged lovers, not just of Cathy and Heathcliff, but the real life Plath and Hughes, too. Plath is buried up at Heptonstall, that heavy slate sky now leaning on her for eternity.

And the first half of the film threatens to overwhelm with loss and loneliness. Think kitchen sink drama and Kes. Johnny is a “miserable, miserable young boy with troubles” trapped by his sense of duty in a dying family, trying and failing to save their dying farm. He “used to be funny” his old school friend reminds him and informs us, something that is, frankly, hard to believe. The first sex scene, at a cattle market with a trainee auctioneer, is shocking in its emotional detachment, but not anywhere near as shocking as the scene that awaits him when he gets back from selling the heifer. A newborn calf lies near dead on the concrete floor. He’d only stopped for a sandwich and a three minute encounter in the back of the cattle truck, I can’t help thinking, but even that was too long away from his responsibilities at the farm. “You could have saved that”, his father says, before making his son shoot it in the head. Lordy, no wonder the poor boy is a near alcoholic and lacks emotional intelligence. But I guess they can’t afford a vet.

It’s a film that doesn’t shy away from the violence, including the sexual violence, between its two main characters, either. For all his doe-eyed charm, the much put-upon Gheorghe has his own demons, and at times responds to both racism and infidelity with threats of, or actual, physical aggression. And in a deeply troubling moment, Johnny attempts to sexually assault his future boyfriend in a manner that had me worrying all the way home about how to instil an understanding of consent in my sons.  I hated those old films in which women would get “ravished” by a cad but somehow ended up falling in love with them. So it is testimony to this film’s nuance that it can take such an action and turn it around. I did ask myself if I would have responded in the same way if it had been a heterosexual coupling, but it wasn’t, and I think that was the point. This happened because it was two men and one of them perceived the other as a threat. Rather than minimising it, the almost documentary style of the filming critiqued these troubling traits of masculinity and male competition.

And then, interwoven with the graphic farming scenes and the unromanticised naked bodies, were shots of daffodils and little baa-lambs and all those paschal tropes of rebirth and forgiveness. I felt it was a tremendous privilege to see a lamb being brought into the world in such an intense and personal way, and even the stillbirth later of another lamb ended up being something ultimately positive, as its skinned fleece, when put on a runt, led to the latter being accepted and suckled by the dead lamb’s mother. At times I felt like I was witnessing the answer to somebody else’s prayer. Gheorghe’s skills at husbandry extended beyond the care of livestock to include the members of the household, too, as through his presence they gradually remembered how to be a family. Johnny’s very slow metamorphosis from a morose, monosyllabic misanthrope to a loving son and grandson, caring farmer and sweet young lover was incredibly moving, especially to me as the mother of a very young boy who already finds it difficult to express his emotions and develop friendships. When Johnny bathed his father who was unable to bathe himself, it was a powerfully dramatic moment, but it was the smallness of many of his new kindnesses that made his rebirth seem real: tending a sheep with antiseptic, leaping up to hold open the door for his Nan and take her load. (Whatever next? I thought. Washing the dishes? Doing his own ironing?) And, if I’m taking this idea of a queer redemption in a broken landscape too far, well, it is hardly my fault. If you have a dark-haired bearded young man sitting atop a hill cuddling a lamb, what can you expect? You don’t have to be religious to get that Gheorghe is a veritable Saviour for Johnny’s Everyman. Reader, I think he may have married him. Which takes me back to the scrap of nursery rhyme in the magpie image: one for loneliness, two for joy.

So much of this film was communicated through pictures and natural sounds rather than by words. In fact, it is the soundscape of the film that underscores its unapologetically romantic second half. Gheorghe had his own special wind theme that was associated with him, bringing change and spring. When he first took Johnny’s hand whilst mending the breached drystone wall we heard curlews. Collared doves cooed at the riverbank, swallows chirruped in the barns and outside the bedroom window. Birds that make nests together stay together. And whereas the first half was all mud and violence, the second half focussed on domesticity, on cooking a meal, putting flowers on a table, making sheep cheese in a pretty floral tea towel, and if nobody ever quite managed to say “I love you” to each other, they learned how to let love in.

Like My Beautiful Laundrette and Maurice, two films which – along with the televised version of Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit – helped me to come out in my late teens, this was a liberating, hopeful, inclusive portrayal of same-sex love. Which person, gay or straight, female or male, hasn’t put on the jumper left behind by a first girlfriend or boyfriend? I went to see God’s Own Country because it was LGBTQ themed and also because it was set in my adopted home of Yorkshire. However, the other relationships in the film turned out to be as affecting, and in quite unexpected ways. I found myself walking home from the cinema across the Knavesmire, in the rain, tears streaming down my face for my daughter who has grown up and flown the nest, my little sons who don’t yet realise how difficult becoming a man will sometimes be, and myself because I hadn’t allowed myself to process all these things yet.

I then went to see the film a second time with my friend, an ex-shepherdess, driving out past fields of sheep to Thirsk, the heart, not only of God’s, but also of James Herriot’s country. I was mildly entertained by the whispered commentary behind me in the Ritz Cinema during some of the slightly racier of the film’s scenes – “Well, I never,” and “Goodness me!” One of the retired volunteers asked the audience nervously as we came out if we had been shocked. “Not at all” I said, which was a lie, because I had been shocked, just not at the things she meant. “It’s great to see positive gay representation on the screen,” I added. “Oh,” she said. Afterwards ex-shepherdess and I sat in a provincial pub and whilst I was musing over the metaphors in God’s Own Country, she was more concerned about the practicalities. Who would inherit the farm if they were both men and couldn’t have children? As a lesbian parent myself that was easy to answer and I offered various Adam and Ian type scenarios from The Archers. But the farm, she said, how is it possibly going to survive in this environment, even with two young men to do the work?

That’s where the cheese comes in, surely? I said. You know, the artisan Romanian cheese making micro business they’ll set up to save the family fortunes. I’m sure there was a snippet of a documentary about a reopened mill somewhere in the background of the film. And what about that wonderfully, bucolically nostalgic film footage of farms at the end, with the sons taking over from the fathers?

But darn-it, it’s like the First World War ruining Forster’s happy ending for Maurice and the gamekeeper, Alec. The nation has only gone and voted for Brexit.

I choose to ignore that reality for now, and believe in a fantasy where an outsider can come into a community and redeem it. I go home to listen to A Winged Victory for the Sullen, and Patrick Wolf:

And I long to be carried on
Just once to be lifted strong
Out of the loneliness
And the emptiness
Of the days

Thank you for this review of my review!!!

Farewell My Concubine: Banned in China, 1993 blogpost.  LGBT icons: Johnny and Omar or Caroline and Kate? blogpost.

The Film Programme interview with Francis Lee; The BAFTA screening Q&A with Francis Lee and Josh O’Connor; Empire Magazine Review; Cast and Creatives (BFI site); British Library The Remains of Elmet

Further GOCFanFamily silliness and joy: Quiz meet up and Fanzine

My God’s Own Country fan fiction