Review by Benjamin Poole
Directed by: Carmen Emmi
Starring: Tom Blyth, Russell Tovey, Amy Forsyth, Christian Cooke, Maria Dizzia, Gabe Fazio
You have to wonder what they were so utterly terrified of. And this wasn't occurring centuries ago, or in third world countries in thrall to prehistoric ideology: it was happening in Britain and in the US, countries both apparently built upon standards of freedom and civility. In the UK, homosexual men were seen as such a threat to fragile society that policing budgets were devoted to hunting down the gays, raiding their clubs, regulating their sex lives (the notorious Operation Spanner, wherein 16 men were successfully prosecuted for consensual s&m sexual activity after hundreds of others were questioned/persecuted as part of the process. Imagine the embarrassment of being part of that prosecution team, essentially advertising your rizzless lack of sexual adventure to the world). I'll never get gay panic: in the most practical terms if gay men are pushed away in their little saunas and disco clubs then surely that means less competition for the breeders? Yet they remain fascinated. If you spend more than five minutes with any group of straight men, gayness is guaranteed to come up as an insult, as banter. It's an obsession with them. In the US, where Carmen Emmi's nineties (!) set thriller Plainclothes takes place, police similarly tracked down gay men through undercover entrapment, raids, and surveillance (in New York, no less - what's the gay equivalent of fish in a barrel?). In Emmi's film, we pick up with a member of the so called "Pretty Police" as his role as a clandestine cottager turns out to be less about putting the boys behind bars and more about stepping out of the closet...
Of course, most of straight disapprobation is jealousy. It is not homophobia it's homoenvy, honey. In some cases, this happens because people don't have the courage to be who they are, and internalise their selfhood, and hate themselves and everybody else (and my heart goes out - it can't be good). But mainly it's because the world of the heterosexual is a sick and boring life, and queers are just better and they know it. This point is aptly illustrated in the opening of Plainclothes, where young cop Lucas (Tom Blyth) returns to the festive familial home and its quotidian heteronormative nightmare: a father and adult son argue and fight, there are children, and his mother is on about making lentil soup. It's NYE too, which can't help; you'd rather be anywhere else. Underlining his double life, just prior to this illustrative sequence we've seen Lucas involved in a sting. He works a mall, making eyes at lonely looking blokes until the gaydar kicks in and it is off to the lavs where an arresting officer awaits. The implication is fascinating as surely this only works if the undercover officer pings, too: gay men just know, and surely no mark would be fooled by anything less than family? This is certainly the case with Lucas, who is sweaty sick with guilt following the arrest, the camera spinning and the visual set montaging to express his turmoil; protecting nothing and forbidden to serve.
It's a measure of Plainclothes' success that we do however empathise with Lucas. Despite being a little turncoat who duly follows his ridiculously inequitable orders, via Emmi's direction Blyth's wide-eyed performance bestows a deep-seated fear in Lucas, a humanity which suggests that he goes along with the oppression out of frantic self-preservation. After all, it's ACAB not AC/DC. This confusion reaches a watershed when he meets hot dad Andrew (played by the wonderful Russel Tovey), and falls deeply in lust, love and inconveniently undeniable self-recognition. Not even out to himself, Lucas must come to terms with his own feelings (which surge with long-awaited catharsis), while still fulfilling his collaborative surveillance. Unlike in Cruising, where Al Pacino's strutting cupboard queen is as much seduced by the queer lifestyle as he is having it off with blokes, there is no such scene in Plainclothes. The gay existence is lonely, anxious and compromised, and fuelled by desperate longings; sensations which take their toll on Lucas in ways that are convincingly horrible.
A minor gripe is the film's use of different film textures and jarring visual contrasts: part of the conceit is that when we see Lucas' point of view, the lens is that of a home movie, giving the sequences a historical remove. This stylistic approach is dynamic but at times distracts from the sincere performances. And, compellingly, these are performances which themselves depict performances: double edged presentations of ostensible conformity and harrowing interior despair. Despite capitulating to 2025 cinematic trends (the millennial banger here is OMC's How Bizarre, along with a throwing someone across the room moment ala the boring Weapons), the pristinely bleak nineties period detail gives Plainclothes a reassuring distance, but its message is regrettably evergreen. In an era where male policemen rape and murder women, and just this week a BBC documentary filmed police undercover (your rules lads) spouting the most racist and misogynist bile (turns out gay men weren't the real threat after all), Plainclothes is a film about fucking the police which accordingly provides a pertinent social reminder: Fuck the Police.
Plainclothes is in UK/ROI cinemas from October 10th.
