Love On the Moors

„God’s Own Country“ has been called Yorkshire’s Brokeback Mountain, but this story of tender love in a harsh land is much more besides.

By Chris Cummins

A bird flaps its wings forlornly in a cage that is propped against a grey stone wall outside a remote Yorkshire farmhouse. It’s a strong, if not particularly subtle, symbol of the frustration of young sheep farmer Johnny – broodingly played by Josh O’Connor.

There’s not much joy in Johnny’s life. His stern and taciturn father has been incapacitated by a stroke. He has no memory of his mother, who abandoned the family’s isolated life on the hill-farm in the Yorkshire Dales of northern England when Johnny was an infant.

Nor can he connect with his former friends, who’ve left for what he calls their “posh colleges” while he has been abandoned, in his words, to deal with the “real world.” With cows to feed, even a night out in the mildly bright-lights of Bradford is out of the question.

Fatigued Disillusionment

The young farmer finds escape in fleeting, hurried and mute gay sex encounters in grimy toilets, followed by joyless bouts of solitary binge-drinking. These self-destructive sessions leave him pale-faced and puffy-eyed, the picture of fatigued disillusionment.

Looking painfully hung-over, he sets about the relentless drudgery on the clearly failing sheep farm. There’s a collapsed stone wall that needs fixing, a heifer is in danger of miscarrying and, back at the farmhouse, there’s nothing but scorn from his grumpy father when he claims he’s “coping.” With little to look forward to at home but a silent austere dinner with a can of beer; the alcoholic binging in the village below seems ever more plausible. As he says himself “there’s nowt else going on around here.”

Sometimes cinema opens up windows to new worlds, sometimes it provides a revelatory mirror to a world you know. I grew up in these Yorkshire hills („God’s Own Country“ is the way Yorkshiremen refer to their home region, with only a small dose of irony)

Tough but Debt-ridden

As a small boy, I “helped out” on such Dales sheep farms, riding on the back of quad bikes or trotting after my Uncle Charles and his sheep in the sweepingly romantic dark-green folds of limestone hills which smell of wet earth and moss. I know these villages, which smell of coal-smoke from the chimneys. I know these farming communities; proud of their toughness but often riddled with debt and surviving on subsidies and a tireless determination to keep a dying way of life alive.

I love this land, which is brilliantly evoked by filmmaker Francis Lee who captures both the majesty and melancholy of its grassy isolation. When a farm-hand from Romania, Gheorghe, arrives to help out with the spring-time lambing season he comments “It’s beautiful here…, but lonely, no?” Exactly. It’s great to visit, but hard to live there.

Immigration/Emigration

Gheorghe, delicately played by Alec Secareanu, is the catalyst for change in what turns out to be an unexpectedly tender love story. The young bearded Romanian has left his own failed-farm and his own country which has been blighted by youthful emigration.

Everywhere you go, he tells Johnny, you’ll find a mother crying for a departed child. Gheorghe, a sensitive and proud man, has been forced to join that exodus westwards; abandoning his beautiful homeland, like thousands of others, to be barked at, patronized and barracked in a caravan like a modern-day serf.

If cinema is, as it is claimed, a machine for creating empathy this window into cross-European migration dynamic is a moving parable for the Brexit age. Nigel Farage would do well to watch it.

A Parable For The Age of Brexit

Although they need his help desperately, Gheorghe is received with suspicion and hostile xenophobia rather than gratitude. Johnny comments on his dark skin and calls him repeatedly “Gypsy” or “Gippo” and his father suggests he is “a waif and stray” and that he has to move on after a week because the farm is “no charity”. With stoically downcast eyes, the Romanian silently swallows the insults and, through his gentle skills wins the family over.

The lambing scenes are shot in almost documentary style and are rife with symbolism about shedding identities. Gheorghe skins a still-born lamb and then places the fleeced skin like a coat over a runt lamb that has been rejected by its mother, to fool the mother of the still-born into suckling the runt. Because it smells like her lamb she adopts it. It’s a life-saving skill that I’ve watched performed by my sister when she was a veterinary student. It’s minor act of heroism on the somber hills.

A Yorkshire Brokeback Mountain?

Since the film has been trumpeted as a Yorkshire version of 2005’s „Brokeback Mountain“, it is not a spoiler to hint that the backbone of the story will be the ensuing love story between the migrant worker and hard-boiled young farmer. But it’s much more that a resetting of Annie Proulx’s short story in a new location.

Lee, who left his family farm to go to drama school at 20, exploring his sexuality on the London gay scene, is telling a nuanced story he understands intimately. There’s a cinematic leap of faith to accommodate the coincidence of two gay characters thrust together on an isolated moor, but once you take that leap, the scenes ring true.

Homophobia is an issue: you sense Johnny’s isolation derives partly from his perceived need for secrecy; he is defensive when his friend Robyn (Patsy Ferran) hints at his sexuality and there are tears of disappointment when Johnny’s grandmother (Gemma Jones) discovers the secret of his relationship with Gheorghe. But this is followed by tacit acceptance; the grandmother’s quiet wish for her lonely grandson to be happy. As Lee told the Financial Times “Homophobia is not somehow inherent in rural, working-class communities.”

The film seems less about sexuality that it is about the discovery of tenderness and beauty in the midst of a harsh world. Johnny begins to see his surroundings through Gheorghe’s admiring eyes. He is inspired by Gheorghe’s self-possessed sensitivity and begins to shed his prickly armour of self-containment. Gheorghe’s imported ideas bring new hope to the farm.

It is in essence a coming-of-age story and a cross-cultural love story that transcends any specific community. Accompanied by a minimalist but powerful score, written by A Winged Victory for the Sullen, God’s Own Country is a great feat of storytelling and poetic piece of cinema.