Francis Lee makes love stories in which earning a living matters as much as the attraction. His patient attention to bodies and place is worth our time, though God's Own Country gives one lover considerably more thought than the other.
Fi1m perspective
In God's Own Country (2017), Johnny Saxby's unhappiness does not excuse him from tending the sheep. Francis Lee makes farming part of the romance because it occupies the bodies and the time of the people falling in love. He uses little dialogue, asking physical action and sound to do much of the explaining. We recommend the film for that patience: Johnny is allowed to be difficult without an immediate explanation that makes him easier to like.
The rural attention was already there in the short The Farmer's Wife (2012), before God's Own Country became his first feature. Ammonite (2020), his second, moves to the nineteenth-century palaeontologist Mary Anning and exchanges farming for fossil work. The change of period leaves his interest in isolated people and practical labour intact. These are small, intimate stories in which earning a living takes up time that another director might spend on declarations.
Lee has worked with cinematographers Joshua James Richards and Stéphane Fontaine, and his close framing gives physical action the attention usually reserved for speech. His insistence that actors undertake the farming and fossiling themselves helps keep that work credible. In God's Own Country, Josh O'Connor and Alec Secăreanu make the physical intimacy as convincing as the labour. We were moved by their tenderness.
The reservation is Gheorghe, whose needs get less consideration than Johnny's. Lee's script too often relies on the Romanian man's patience to make the relationship possible, rather than giving him an equally complicated life. Secăreanu keeps him credible, but good acting cannot supply every missing piece of a character. We want to know what Gheorghe wants for himself, not only what his presence might change in Johnny.
Lee's reluctance to explain people is mostly a strength, provided it does not become a reason to leave one of them underwritten. His deliberate pace also asks for a willingness to watch labour rather than hurry towards the next conversation. Start with God's Own Country, and allow it an evening when nobody is waiting for the plot to hurry up.
Biography
Francis Lee is an English filmmaker, screenwriter and former actor. He was born on 2 April 1969 on his family's farm in Soyland, Calderdale, West Yorkshire. After studying acting at Rose Bruford College he worked in theatre and appeared in television series including Peak Practice, Midsomer Murders, Heartbeat and Casualty, as well as the film Topsy-Turvy (1999).
Lee began directing with short films including The Farmer's Wife (2012). His feature debut, God's Own Country (2017), which he wrote and directed, premiered at Sundance where it won the World Cinema Directing Award. His second feature, Ammonite (2020), starred Kate Winslet and Saoirse Ronan.
