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God's Own Country - a review

*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 Yorkshire countryside, not in an urban environment, that it features (mostly) working class people and that one of those people is a Romanian immigrant seem much more significant in the end. 

It is worth noting that despite some rather vigorous sexual encounters of a homosexual nature and the passing display of male genitalia, the censors, in their wisdom, thought that all that was required was a 15 certificate. This is a sign of progress no doubt. Another sign of this, possibly, is that, had this story been told five to ten years ago, we would probably not have been granted the happy ending we now get and our heroes would not have been allowed to go roam the greenwood (as Forster called it in Maurice).

Beyond the sweet love story, however GOC can, I think, be viewed as a portrayal of, and a metaphor for modern Britain. And it is fair to say that the DVD of GOC won't be on Farage's Christmas list. 

We are presented with an insular little group of people, stuck in a hopeless rut and deeply unhappy for it. They are facing emotional and financial ruin and they are, in the end, only saved by the arrival of a skilled worker from Romania and the upheaval it causes (that nationality can't have been chosen by chance after the scare stories published in the right-wing press not so long ago). 

In the context of the unfolding debacle that is the UK's decision to leave the EU and to cut itself from the rest of Europe, the plot of the film takes a highly symbolic meaning which turns into a deeply socially and politically engaged film, and this is what transcends its possible status as a modest romcom to being a true work of art.

Comments

  1. Excellent review. GOC, of course, is tongue in cheek as Yorkshire likes to believe that is God's Promised Land and the title references this rather than the UK as a political unit. I really enjoyed this.

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