*MILD SPOILER ALERT* God's Own Country (GOC) has been garnering plaudits from critics and audiences alike. The gays on my TL who's seen it are raving about it. Yet on the face of it the film hardly seem material for success. It is a totally conventional romcom story (indeed it has been compared to another (Brokeback Mountain)): an interloper comes to rescue the main character from the doldrums. They don't like each other at the beginning but love triumphs in the end. The worth here is in the storytelling. The justness of the tone, full of delicate details but always successfully avoiding sentimentality, the sensitive portrayals of the characters, the raw, unflinching scenes, make GOC an out of the ordinary exploration of love and male identity. That the film is a gay love story is, I would argue, ultimately quite secondary, a narrative device almost, although to most viewers this will probably feel quite central. The facts that it is set in the dourness of the ...
life, with a pink seasoning; an LGBT perspective.