The Pride Parade is going virtual this year, so I’m using that as an excuse to organize this edition of NOW Streaming along a theme. Here are a whole bunch of recommendations for Pride-related programming so you can stay home and watch stuff, if that’s what you want to do. (And you might as well, because it sounds like this weekend is going to be kind of gross, with all the humidity.)
Top streaming pick
I’ve written about God’s Own Country a number of times in the past, but I have a good reason: there aren’t a lot of movies that are as observant, as empathetic or as genuine as Francis Lee’s 2017 breakout that plays as a gritty, messy inversion of Ang Lee’s carefully manicured Brokeback Mountain.
God’s Own Country is also about two ranch hands who fall in love while working with sheep on a mountain, but it’s nowhere near as picturesque: its mountain is a dirty hill in Yorkshire, where young Johnny Saxby (Josh O’Connor) spends his days working his family’s sheep farm and enduring the indifference of his infirm father and stern grandmother. He escapes to the pub, where he cruises for joyless, clandestine sex. And he hates himself for that.
Johnny’s attracted to men, but he won’t admit it – either to himself, or to anyone else – until a slightly older ranch hand, Gheorghe (Alex Secareanu), arrives for lambing season and immediately sees right through him. And over the course of the film, Gheorghe draws Johnny out of his shell. It’s not a seduction, but an act of understanding and acceptance: Gheorghe simply lets Johnny exist, without judgment or question. Johnny has to decide what that means, and the movie hangs all of its drama on his choice.
It’s a smaller, more crushingly intimate film than Brokeback Mountain, its characters trapped together by circumstance as much as by their attraction. There’s nowhere to go, no sham marriage to pursue; as much as Johnny tries to avoid Gheorghe, Gheorghe is right there with him, seeing him, offering his unspoken support. O’Connor and Secareanu have incredible chemistry together – and if you only know O’Connor as The Crown’s simpering, spineless Prince Charles you’ll be struck by his raw presence here; the wonder isn’t that Gheorghe sees him, but that everyone else can’t.
God’s Own Country is available to stream for free on Hoopla; it’s also available to rent or buy on most VOD platforms.
Buried treasure on Netflix Canada
I am willing to bet only a fraction of you have heard of Handsome Devil. But I would also bet that everyone reading this will enjoy it. John Butler’s subtle 2016 drama, set at an Irish boys’ school where bullied teenager Ned (Fionn O’Shea) finds himself drawn to his new roommate Conor (Nicholas Galitzine), takes a fairly conventional coming-of-age narrative and makes it feel sweet, weird and personal, introducing plot elements like an inspirational English teacher straight out of Dead Poets Society – and who’s played with just a hint of an edge by Fleabag’s Andrew Scott – only to spin them in unexpected directions.
Butler, who made the bachelor-party comedy (which also found a fine use for Scott’s jittery presence), is exploring what’s possible when a queer coming-of-age story refuses to plot a tragic course for its characters; that’s happening more and more these days, but just five years ago Handsome Devil stood out for being a film that lets its young hero understand he doesn’t have to feel guilty or ashamed of who he is. And O’Shea, who a lot of people would subsequently notice as Jamie in Normal People, is quietly wonderful in the lead, showing us Ned’s development in little smiles and looks, rather than big declarative moments. He’s as surprised as anyone to be figuring himself out, really.
Handsome Devil is available to stream on Netflix Canada.
Double Feature By Pat Mills
To program this week’s marquee, I reached out to actor and filmmaker Pat Mills, whose latest movie The Retreat marks a distinct shift from more comic projects like Guidance, Don’t Talk To Irene and CBC Gem’s Queens. It’s a thriller starring Tommie-Amber Pirie and Sarah Allen as a young couple whose cottage weekend turns into a fight for their survival, and it’s pretty damn effective. (You can find my review here.)
“I’ve needed to find the humour in all the darkness since the pandemic started, so what better time to indulge in my love of dark comedies!” he says.
To that end, Pat found himself drawn to two projects from 2011: Mike White’s HBO series Enlightened, and Jason Reitman and Diablo Cody’s feature film Young Adult.
“Both follow complicated women hitting rock bottom,” Pat says, “and how they, as outsiders, carve out a way forward. I relate to these characters more than I would like to admit, especially after this past year. Both Laura Dern and Charlize Theron deserved way more love for these amazing performances. As an added bonus, Laura Dern screaming ‘Motherfucker!’ in Enlightened is one of my favourite sounds in the world. And she does it a lot.”
Young Adult is available to stream on Amazon Prime Video Canada through Tuesday
(June 29), and available to rent or buy on most VOD platforms;
Enlightened is available to stream on Crave, and available to buy on Apple TV.
The Retreat is available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other VOD services;
and Queens is available to stream on CBC Gem.
Last chance to stream
I spent part of this week going through Criterion’s exquisite Marlon Riggs boxed set – you can read about it at the bottom of this week’s streaming guide – and while I was checking to see which of Riggs’s films are available on the Criterion Channel, I discovered another watershed work of queer 80s cinema, Lizzie Borden’s Born In Flames, is leaving the service at the end of the month.
Made on a shoestring in 1983, Borden’s vérité look at a near-future New York where feminist pirate radio stations are the only resistance to a dictatorial government bent on returning women to stereotypical roles of housewives and caretakers, it’s one of the angriest movies I’ve ever seen – a direct response to the Reagan revolution that clocks the real agenda underneath the pandering, folksy bullshit and proceeds to lay out a road map to revolution.
Some of the performances are on the ragged side, but that weirdly plays into the documentary-style presentation; there are moments in Born In Flames that feel like they’ve escaped from some alternate universe where The Handmaid’s Tale was a blueprint rather than a warning. And yes, Margaret Atwood’s novel was still a couple of years away, but trust me: the comparison holds.
Born In Flames is available to stream on the Criterion Channel through June 30. You can also find most of the Marlon Riggs package there.
If you like this, you might like that
I’ve been trying to find a pairing for Feel Good, one of my favourite new shows, but I keep coming up empty: nothing else has the precise crackle of Mae Martin’s brilliant Netflix series about a deeply passionate (and deeply troubled) Canadian stand-up falling for a straight-identifying Englishwoman. But I have recently discovered a show that has a similar perspective: Anne+, a tiny little web series from the Netherlands.
Anne+ isn’t as agitated or as confessional as Feel Good, but it has the same questing energy. Anne (Hannah Van Vliet) is a 24-year-old woman in Amsterdam trying to figure herself out, and rolling back through her former relationships wondering what did and didn’t work. (The episodes are named for each pairing, hence the plus sign in the show’s title.) What did she learn from her affair with Esther (Kirsten Mulder), her former boss? What went wrong with the wild, impulsive Janna (Sharai Rodrigues)? Should Anne have done things differently? Is she the reason things always fall apart?
Over six girlfriends and three episodes, Anne’s larger story reveals itself, and it’s nothing too shocking: she’s young, and she’s figuring stuff out. But within the confines of a tiny little character study, that’s perfectly satisfying – and the show’s success has led to the production of a second series and a feature film, which I hope make it to Gem before too long.
The first series of Anne+ is available to stream on CBC Gem.
Both seasons of Feel Good are available to stream on Netflix Canada.
Play us out
And that’s it for another week. (Just in time, too, because the sky has opened up and I have a hell of a pressure headache.) I’ll see you back here for the long weekend, and until then please avail yourselves of all the resources on the NOW website: our July previews for Netflix, Crave and Disney+ have gone up, and you might also enjoy my review of the car movie, which is now playing exclusively at drive-ins around the GTA. Because even in a pandemic, sometimes things work out perfectly.
Email me at normw@nowtoronto.com if you’re so inclined, or hit me up on Twitter at @normwilner. And keep an eye on nowtoronto.com/movies for content throughout the week, of course.
The hyperlink is missing in the mention above, but it’s https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2573858/
(still “The Stag” when we saw it at TIFF and expected it to be a huge hit etc. etc. ).