Historicised Queerness: God's Own Country vs Ammonite

In Francis Lee’s God’s Own Country (2017) we follow Johnny, a sheep farmer from Yorkshire and Gheorghe, a Romanian migrant worker hired on the farm, who develop a relationship with restrained use of language. It is a queer love story of the present-day steeped in thoroughly modern anxieties concerning the relationship between queerness, vulnerability and masculinity. Hence, this film is set in a context which crucially forces the audience to consider both social class and queerness in contemporary Britain.

Right now, the reviews are currently rolling in for Lee’s follow up feature film Ammonite (2020). Ammonite is set to follow a fictionalised love story between two real women of the 1840s; Mary Anning and Charlotte Murchinson. The story is yet again illuminating how Lee is concerned with writing narratives on queerness and commentaries about social class, however, the topic of this short essay asks which of these films will offer more for present-day audiences.

This commentary isn’t asking every filmmaker concerned with queer love to push their narratives into the present date. Generally, queer audiences are still interested in the prospect of seeing queer love on screen in any time period. The representation is always felt. However, there should be a consideration of optics for general audiences. Locating queer love in the past for present-day audiences allows individuals to leave films thanking the present day for its success in completing a queer rights arc. This is the real danger with so much left to be done for queer love right now. There is a need to ask films to address current concerns in familiar settings to produce an aware and conscious audience.

There is also something to be said about the prevalence of queer love being set in the past recently. My curiosity in Ammonite as a film comes directly off the back of seeing Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019). Although the two have a very different premise, time period, and space, the lesbian romance and historical settings pair the two films especially in the short time span between their releases. Why are filmmakers choosing this space to explore queer love?

For screenwriters and authors alike, I hypothesise that writing queer love in the past allows for the love to avoid the climate of politicisation it may connote in the present day. In a distant time period, romance is left to play without the modern language of queerness. Queer love as a ‘trope’ can be used to write an unsaid difficulty into a love story in any time period, the past being a safe space for this trope to be established without too much exposition.

Queer love in films is a joy to see for queer audiences but, as a theme, it definitely has the power to communicate with general audiences the issues concerning queerness in the present day. A trend of using the past as a medium to explore queer love can perhaps be cast aside just for the moment. There is an urgent need for representing queerness in films with themes hidden behind a cultural taboo yet to be acknowledged in this scale of filmmaking. Using Lee’s two films to angle this debate has been a reduction of wider evidence but, nevertheless, this has highlighted a recent trend in feature films that could be evolving at the expense of more progressive and educational narratives.