God’s Own Country is one of those films where I didn’t realise how much I loved it until the end credits began and I became aware of just how moved I was and how well-crafted a film it is. The film begins bleakly on a windswept farm in Yorkshire in northern England, and the protagonist is Josh, a morose and bitter young man whose only outlets from the drudgery of farm life is binge drinking and anonymous sex. Farm life and his personal life are characterised viscerally with dirt, flesh and bodily fluids. When Romanian migrant worker Gheorghe first enters the picture to work with Josh it’s difficult to see what he or the audience will find appealing about his new surroundings and companion. By the end of the film, Yorkshire had become a place of sublime beauty, Josh had convincingly matured and evolved into a character of depth and compassion, and God’s Own Country had become one of the most touching, heartfelt and sincere films that I have seen all year. For a film that seemed impenetrable when it began, I ended up not wanting it to end.
While the title of the America romantic comedy The Big Sick identifies illness as the main source of drama in this based-on-a-true-story film, the real source of the film’s pathos and laughs is how well it navigates cultural clashes in contemporary America. Much of the film’s charm comes from how well it depicts the traditional Pakistani Muslim family that actor/writer Kumail Nanjiani (who plays a version of himself in the film) comes from. The difficulties Kumail faces in rejecting his family’s attempts to arrange a marriage for him with another Pakistani woman, to instead pursue his love for American woman Emily Gardner (played by Zoe Kazan and based on writer Emily V Gordon), is treated with humour, but never derision or condemnation. This is a film about navigating family as much as it is about finding love, and it’s refreshing, nuanced and very funny.
Since seeing James Gray’s The Lost City of Z I’ve since discovered that there is a lot of debate about the significance of 20th century British explorer Percy Fawcett and the value of his various expeditions into the Amazon rainforest. The extent to which the film may be printing the legend over the facts didn’t really concern me as my interest was how the film worked as a sort of revisionist explorer film that downplayed the heroics and hardships of being in the jungle, and instead presented a critique of the colonialist spirit of conquering and taming supposedly uncivilised parts of the world. The film challenges attitudes towards gender, race and class while still celebrating the spirit of exploration and honouring the ultimate mystery and tragedy of what happened to Fawcett.
With only two episodes to go, the new series of Twin Peaks has continued to be continuously inventive, delightful, dark, hilarious, strange and brilliant. For the most part it has avoided indulging in nostalgia or fan service, often by referencing the original series only in ways that are completely unexpected. But that moment in episode 16 was executed brilliantly and completely worth the wait.
CINEMA AUTOPSY 