God's Own Country

The life of Johnny (Josh O'Connor, “Callengers”) is barren and lonely. Somewhere in the north of England, the 24-year-old lives and works on his family's remote sheep farm. The few words spoken between him, his sick father and his stoic grandmother are mostly rude. To numb the frustration of his cramped life, Johnny gets drunk every evening in the nearby pub. From time to time he also has casual sex with young men. When seasonal worker Gheorghe (Alec Secăreanu) from Romania, who is the same age as Johnny, comes to the farm in spring, Johnny initially reacts with a hostile mixture of mistrust and bad temper. Gradually, the two young men grow closer during the hard farm work. Fleeting glances and gestures turn into touching - until they have sex for the first time in the seclusion of a camp in the high moors. But Johnny doesn't just desire Gheorghe physically. He also feels a sense of security with him that he never knew before. But the end of the season is approaching - and with it Gheorghe's departure back to Romania... “God's Own Country” sounds like the British version of ‘Brokeback Mountain’ with gay cowboys Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger. And indeed, director and screenwriter Francis Lee has taken part of his debut film from his own story: As a young man, he himself had to choose between working on a small farm in Yorkshire and studying acting near London. It was the latter that he chose - fortunately, as Lee's multi-award-winning drama not only demonstrates his talent for a captivating narrative style indebted to realism, but also an extraordinary staging of the surrounding nature. “Lee presents large landscape panoramas, he stages nature and male physicality, the aggressive bodies of the boys, but also Johnny's father's body, emaciated by working the land. It is as if he wanted to discover a secret beauty and hidden poetry in the violence of this landscape, in the cruelty of nature, in the closed-off people. There are countless close-ups of hands in Lee's film. Hands doing their work. Hands touching animals. Hands reaching for other hands. Lee develops a choreography of gestures that expresses longing: for closeness, for a rediscovered home. [...] Their love, which Lee also stages very erotically, is initially a struggle, a bitter struggle in every respect. Gheorghe succeeds in gaining access to the freak and loser Johnny. Aggression becomes passion, becomes tenderness. In some beautiful scenes, which are somewhat reminiscent of Michael Powell films, Lee shows an almost magical, fairytale-like understanding of nature, in which love, landscape and light form a unity.” (Hans Schifferle, on: epd-film.de)