God’s Own Country

four stars

Dir: Francis Lee

With: Josh O’Connor, Gemma Jones, Alec Secareanu

WITHIN the first ten minutes of God’s Own Country, the opening gala at this year’s Edinburgh International Film Festival, the lead character vomits into a toilet in some wind-blasted Yorkshire farm that is itself going down the U-bend; sticks his arm into a farmyard animal All Creatures Great and Small-style; and continues his day by having soulless sex with a stranger at a cattle market.

By eck it’s grim up north.

Francis Lee’s debut feature, screened last night, does come dangerously close to parody at times, which makes it all the more impressive when he manages to eventually fashion a film that turns out to be as sweetly memorable as it is hard-hitting about the hardships of rural life.

Josh O’Connor (smoothie chops Larry In ITV’s The Durrells) dons full northern jacket to play Johnny, a lad who used to be, it the words of a former pal home from university, a “right laugh”. As Johnny reminds her bitterly, that was before he had to join the “real world” in which his dad (Ian Hart) has had a stroke, and it is up to Johnny and his grandmother (Gemma Jones) to run the struggling farm.

With the busy season due to start, gran hires a migrant worker from Romania. Gheorghe (Alec Secareanu) no sooner meets Johnny than he wants to thump him for being a surly pain. But the two go up the hill to do the lambing and each finds the other is not so bad after all.

It would be easy to dismiss GOC as Brokeback Mountain with Yorkshire accents, but superb performances all round, by O’Connor In particular, make this a very British work with distinctive ideas of its own about love in a cold climate.

Screened again at Cineworld, Edinburgh tonight at 6.10pm; UK release, September 1.