ABSTRACT
With its fervent, fully embodied and embedded portrayal of alternatively gendered migrant desire set in Yorkshire, Francis Lee’s 2017 gay romance God’s Own Country illustrates how far British migrant cinema has travelled since Dirty Pretty Things (2002, Frears), which established in British narrative cinema the figure of the migrant as at once urban, straight, and chaste. In fact, with its intensive focus on one man’s gradual understanding of himself as gay and his gradual acquiring of sensitivity and tenderness through affection and erotic love, God’s Own Country corresponds to what Andrew Moor has termed the ‘New Gay Sincerity’: the trend in current, independent queer British cinema towards low-key, observational naturalism wedded to a highly meta-cinematic engagement with traditions of representing non-straight people. It also dares to offer a positive narrative outcome and sense of futurity for queer migrant lives. Through close analysis of composition, reverse-field photography, and point of view, the chapter reveals however, that the film’s achievement is ultimately compromised by a regressive replaying of conventional cinematic codes and forms (notably the use of objective point of view to objectify the migrant as other) while subscribing to familiar tropes of the migrant as European saviour and enabler. The ethico-aesthetic limitations of God’s Own Country are thrown into acute relief by another contemporaneous rural European queer migrant drama, A Moment in the Reeds (2017, Makela), which charts the discovery of intimate emotional and erotic bonds between a young (white) Finnish man and a Syrian refugee in a remote region of Finland. This film frames the men’s burgeoning desire sexual desire and passion in very different ways from God’s Own Country, by deploying wide-angle shots and inclusive frames to create a more inclusive, ex-tended, open ‘multi-field’ based on the equivalence and reciprocity of subject positions. Yet if such fluid, poetic play with cinematic form opens up progressive new ways of portraying the queer migrant figure, this ultimately leads nowhere in narrative terms other than to a resigned but fundamental acknowledgement that one can never simply escape one’s family and background, and that the trauma of migration, whether forced or voluntary, remains on-going.
Taken together, these two films, by radically sexualising and queering European migrant cinema, open up vital new queer migrant vistas that convey the concrete materialities and complex affectivities of queer migrant experience. By doing this within an aesthetic framework of natural beauty, they also reveal that rurality can inspire potent new forms of queer imaginary.
