Francis Lee’s Yorkshire farm romance is frank, tender and worth the patience, with Josh O’Connor and Alec Secăreanu making its physical intimacy convincing. Gheorghe is less fully drawn than Johnny, but we believed in the two of them.
God’s Own Country is a moving romance that takes the work of farming seriously and asks its love story to be equally convincing. Francis Lee, writing and directing, gives us a young man whose unhappiness has made him difficult to reach. The temptation would be to explain him at once, then send somebody in to put him right. He mostly resists it. There are sheep to tend and a family to live alongside before Johnny Saxby can begin to consider what he wants from another person.
Josh O’Connor makes Johnny’s disaffection wearing, as it should be. He allows him to be unpleasant without continually reassuring us that he will make an agreeable romantic lead. His difficulty with tenderness is convincing enough that we do not spend the early scenes impatiently waiting for him to improve. That matters when Alec Secăreanu’s Gheorghe Ionescu arrives as a Romanian worker on the Yorkshire farm.
Alec Secăreanu gives Gheorghe a composure that makes Johnny’s hostility look exhausting. He makes the attraction credible without pretending that Johnny is easy company. We were moved more than we expected by the awkwardness of their physical intimacy. The sex is frank, and the actors make the effort of accepting another person’s touch as important as the desire for it. The encounter is awkward enough to feel private.
Joshua James Richards’s cinematography finds beauty in the Yorkshire landscape without disguising how hard it is to work there. Stéphane Collonge’s production design makes the farm convincing as a place where people have to work every day. Those choices are useful in a genre that can treat the countryside as a convenient escape. Here, the physical business of sheep farming is allowed to be graphic.
Chris Wyatt’s editing gives the opening a briskness that keeps the farm routine from becoming a test of endurance. As the relationship develops, the small changes between the men are given time to matter. Dustin O’Halloran and Adam Wiltzie’s music accompanies the growing tenderness sensitively, although the performances need little assistance. Ian Hart, as Johnny’s father Martin Saxby, helps make the family strain convincing without competing with the central relationship for our attention.
Gheorghe is the reservation. Francis Lee’s script gives Johnny the more complicated inner life, and sometimes seems to expect the Romanian man to supply the patience and understanding the relationship needs. Alec Secăreanu keeps him credible, but we wanted a clearer sense of what Gheorghe needs independently of Johnny. Too often, the script is interested chiefly in what his presence will do for the other man.
At 104 minutes, the film asks for patience with Johnny, though not an entire evening in his company. The explicit sex and graphic farm work make it a poor choice for anyone hoping the countryside will be soothing. Choose it for the two leads, and allow the tenderness to arrive without a speech announcing it.
