![]() ![]() ![]() Guiraudie individualizes the theme through the command of his camera, the beauty of his images and the certitude of his pacing. In a scenario reminiscent of Jean Genet, the film unflinchingly explores the connection between self-obliteration and erotic rapture. The film’s hero, Franck, obsesses on Michele after witnessing a shocking event: Michele has just drowned his lover in the lake. To quote the Pet Shop Boys’ enduring anthem of gay pursuit, To Speak is a Sin. The lapping of the water and rustling of the wind occupy far more of the soundtrack than any human chatter. The entire movie takes place at a remote cruising area (aren’t they all?) comprised of beach, brush and lake. How far would you go to fulfil an erotic desire? In Alain Guiraudie’s 2014 film Stranger by the Lake, the lead character goes as far as a person could, in the process not just courting death but nearly lusting for it. Photograph: Publicity image from film company Pierre Deladonchamps and Christophe Paou in Stranger by the Lake. The scenes of the pair’s budding romance are largely silent (all close-ups, lingering glances, and zipped windbreakers), but both actors shine – in particular O’Connor, who lost so much weight for the role that he ended up in the hospital and whose accent was so convincing in his audition tape that Lee believed he was from Yorkshire. Cinematographer Joshua James Richards (later Oscar nominated for Nomadland) leans into the area’s dreariness, transforming it into a kind of rough beauty with washed out tones, eternally cloudy skies, and windswept rocky hills. In director Francis Lee’s 2017 debut feature, Josh O’Connor plays Johnny Saxby, an angry, sullen Yorkshire sheep farmer who lives with his grandmother and demanding father and numbs himself to his lonely, grimy existence with drunken nights and casual sex – until a strapping Romanian migrant worker (Alec Secareanu) lending a hand on the farm teaches him tenderness and contentment.īased on his own experiences and filmed down the road from the farm where he grew up, Lee shows a preoccupation with anatomy, whether animal or human, and doesn’t flinch from muddy sex and full-frontal nudity nor barnyard births and skinning lambs. Photograph: British Film Institute/Kobal/REX/Shutterstock Peter Bradshaw God’s Own CountryĪlec Secareanu and Josh O’Connor in God’s Own Country. Tangerine was powerfully authentic, raw, emotional and funny. For so long, Hollywood had given us Kiss-Of-The-Spider-Woman casting for queer stories like this: straight actors in campface. Having just got out of prison, Sin-Dee is infuriated to hear that her boyfriend-slash-pimp has been unfaithful and sets out to find him for a showdown – a loose “quest” narrative that facilitates all sorts of show-stopping encounters and set pieces. Fledgling film-makers everywhere were thrilled with the news that he’d shot the entire thing on three iPhones with the Filmic Pro app and more even than this, audiences responded to the magnificent performances of Baker’s stars: Mya Taylor and Kitana Kiki Rodriguez, transgender performers playing versions of their actual selves: two sex workers, Alexandra and Sin-Dee on the tough, unglamorous streets of West Hollywood. Photograph: Augusta Quirk/Magnolia Pictures/Allstarįilm-maker Sean Baker was no newcomer when he released his breakthrough movie Tangerine in 2015, but its amazing lo-fi energy and New Wave freedom had the surge of youth. Each of Jarman’s films operates as an individual facet of a single, brilliant artistic persona, so it’s hardly fair to pick one out over another but Caravaggio, for me, is the one for the ages. Jarman’s approach was to fuse the mechanics of the painter’s art with a fleshly lament for the artist’s brutal, hedonistic life: the sight of Nigel Terry shoving coins into Bean’s mouth is still an amazingly lascivious scene. His films since the mid-70s had dominated British experimental cinema – and my favourite of his films is still the first one I saw in the cinema: his mid-80s fever-dream vision of baroque painter Caravaggio, with a cast that looks even more jaw-dropping in retrospect (Tilda Swinton! Dexter Fletcher!! Sean Bean!!!). Although lionised by the New Queer Cinema movement in the early 90s – then the cuttingest edge of the cutting edge – Derek Jarman in those heady days was hardly a new phenomenon in fact (sad to say), by then he was approaching his personal endgame. ![]()
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