God's own Country
When people have the urge to call a film with a same sex romance "a gay film" they put a barrier between the movie and themselves because they approach it as if "gay" was a genre, and not one of the topics, the same way they put barriers when they label "a girl movie". This barriers not only work for the audience, but for the industry, it's a way of thinking that made studios take that long to give us Wonder Woman, and the same one that makes very unlikely the possibility of a superhero that happens to be attracted to her/his same sex.
God's Own Country is a rural drama that happens to have a queer romance. The plot about two male farm workers that find love in the middle of nowhere will immediately make us think that we'll be dealing with a British Brokeback Mountain. But if both films are effective at reflecting the opposition between violence and tenderness, the big difference is that while in Brokeback Mountain the sexual identity of the main characters was crucial for the development of the film, in God's Own Country, the face that we're dealing with a same-sex couple is merely incidental. If you change the gender of any of the two protagonists, the story would still have been the same.
Johnny is a violent farmer who evades his monotonous rural life with alcohol and casual sex devoid of any possible emotion, raw and animalistic, until a Rumanian immigrants arrives to help at his family farm and little by little, he'll start breaking Johnny's barriers. It is a film about how the countryside lifestyle forces people to hide their feelings, how the hard manual work and the lack of real communication forces people to "toughen up" and erase any trace of sensibility, and how is it that opening up to the possibility of love can make us better persons, ones that are more responsible and who care more from those around us.
God's Own Country is never a film about what means to be queer, the characters never question their identities because of who they chose to be their sexual or affective partner (there's only one brief moment of this fact as a conflict, and comes from a secondary character). It is never implied that this could be the source of Johnny's anger and apathy, it's just something that is there, that gives his character emotional depth. And having a film like this, is a first step towards a post-queer cinema, where characters can be attracted by their same sex and not be defined by that.
But God's Own Country merits rely also on the great performances that Francis Lee gets from his cast, and the way he constructs tension between them. It's a film that understands visual narrative and it's able to tell the story not through dialogue but through actions (and that's a relief since Yorkshire accent can be way too difficult to understand). Sexual scenes reveal the mental state of the characters: when Johnny and Gheorghe have sex for the first time, it's more a fight than a sexual intercourse, it's a way to establish their dominance over the other in the way animals do, no wonder that the director makes this act happen in a puddle of mud. But the second time, they move inside the barn, and Gheorghe insists on this to be a didactic experience, he is there to teach Johnny how sex can be human, and on the long run, to teach him how to love.
The scenery also takes a central piece, and it at times could be another character. Lee makes the most of it with a beautiful cinematography that is good at showing a place that is beautiful, lonely and savage all at once. It's immigration subtext is also very welcomed in the Brexit times, it's almost as if this film is stating that being open to different people will broaden our life experiences.
