For an undercover police in 1997, the art of beta gay men is to propose you in public toilets a grotesque art form that requires strict compliance with the rules. You can’t say a word to your goals, rely on eye contact to convince them that your intentions are sexual. You can’t actually go into a bathroom booth and have to take them to unpack while staying in a public space. And you really should not take their phone number and continue to fall in love with them after failing to arrest.
Yet that’s exactly what Lucas (Tom Blyth) stops doing in “Slubs” Carmen Emmi’s director It is visiting the world of undercover police in the homosexual society that is best known in William Friedkin’s “Cruising.” Distracted by the family’s tensions caused by his father’s terminal illness and tortured by his own gay calls, he calls Andrew (Russell Tovey), a silverfox he tried to capture at the mall he calls an office. Andrew has no idea what Lucas is doing for a living and just thinking that his attempt to pick up cute guys in the mall was a success.
Both men have an interest in keeping their attempts at secret, so they take the time to return each other’s calls and carefully choose meeting places. A rendezvous at a noon film Screening provides space for a greenhookup, which eventually leads to sex in a van. Andrew shows Lucas ropes in gay life in an era of shame, encourages him to visit the promised country San Francisco and tells him that AIDS can be avoided if you use protection and ask him not to sleep with anyone several times to protect his own heart.
Blyth, a rising star in Hollywood, gives the role its best effort, and his movie star looks like some sins. But he is best when he is left to simply collapse on his own, and his lack of chemistry with Tovey ensures that the forbidden love that the whole story never rests completely. And when the film builds against the inevitable heartbeat and collides with intolerant family members, the feeling needed to carry such heavy topics is simply not there.
Emmi and Kinematographer Ethan Palmer approached the project with some creative intentions, switch between image conditions and video formats and use rapid cuts in an attempt to illustrate how Luca’s mind switches between anxiety, paranoia and desire. But the attempts to visualize his feelings rarely work in practice as they do in theory, and the rapid editing during some of his anxiety attacks reveals artificial effects. The world simply did not need another montage that cuts between Hardcore Gaysex and a man who went around who annoyed if he did something wrong. The film lacks either the ambition or the resources – or potentially both – to make one of the stylized sequences really engrossing from a sound, color and narrative perspective, which reduces the editing style to a distraction during a movie that already fell flat.
Even without editing problems, it is not clear that the story legs for “regular clothing” were ever strong enough for the film to work. The entire movie is often similar to a swirling of queer bio archetypes that are performed better on many other occasions. It relies so strongly on Tropes that it is not clear that “ordinary clothing” has something to say. Everything from the homophobic police who is gay himself to a third act of twisting that will remain untouched feels tired, and it is hard to believe that lines like “maybe one day you will find your San Francisco” written in the 2020s.
The type of experiment that “plainclothes” only tries to work when the stories are already on the spot, and Emmi’s movie comes too long before herself in that respect. All aspect conditions in the world cannot overcome the fact that we look at two lovers but particularly obvious chemistry stumbles through a tired story of love and separation that is based on a conclusion. The period of the late 1990s makes an admirable attempt to bring some of the overly recurring legal horror that the queer community meets back in the limelight, but perhaps this story should have been left earlier.
Rating: c
“Plainclothes” premiered at 2025 Sundance Film festival. It is currently seeking US distribution.
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