There haven't been many legitimate thrillers that have staked out the gents' loos as a possible site of tension and unease, so the very least we might say for Carmen Emmi's feature debut Plainclothes is that it's breaking new if somewhat insalubrious cinematic ground. Emmi's protagonist, fresh-faced Officer Lucas Brennan (Tom Blyth), has climbed the macho ranks of his New York state police department thanks to his undercover work in a bland shopping mall, where he entices gay, curious and closeted men alike into the stalls, initiating the illicit activity for which these cruisers can be arrested and charged. (An early blast of OMC's "How Bizarre" pegs the action to some time in the mid-to-late Nineties, that era when George Michael became the most illustrious modern arrestee for the eternally Victorian-sounding crime of importuning.) If Lucas appears unduly conflicted, it's because - unbeknownst to his jockish colleagues - he leans this way himself, and thus intuits more than most the psychic and reputational damage his dirty work might be bringing about. Worse follows after he finds himself tumbling for one of those he tempts into the bathroom: Andrew (Russell Tovey), a self-assured married man who's played the DL game before and would seem to know his way around. The sexuality may have changed - because we're 40 years on, and the movies can be more open about such matters nowadays - but Plainclothes really isn't so different, narratively, from those sweatily heterosexual police thrillers of the late Eighties and early Nineties: once more, we're watching a cop being driven by desire to abandon the taut moral and ethical codes he'd previously set for himself. It's Someone to Watch Over Me with a janitor standing by.
Less glossy than that sounds, perhaps: the new film is, after all, a product of today's thrifty American independent sector. Rougher-edged, too, for Emmi's script proves far stronger on context than it is on scene-by-scene plotting. The action unfolds around a chilly, conservative commuter town, far from the warmth of any latter-day Gay Village; Lucas sporadically returns home to a sprawling, bickering Irish-American family (loving mother Maria Dizzia, homophobic dipshit brother Gabe Fazio). One peculiar formal conceit wouldn't have seemed so out of place in the New Queer Cinema of the early 1990s: Lucas's memories and POV shots are rendered as glitchy video footage, almost as if he's decided to turn himself into a walking surveillance camera, a detached observer of desires he cannot personally fulfil. Here, and yet not for the last time, Plainclothes feels overemphatic. It's a film that often seems somewhat torn itself, unsure whether to catch the eye or walk a more downcast, realistic beat, using sharp montage to cut around the slack in sometimes wobbly material. The hook's strong enough: two men with secrets to keep moving closer and closer, with all the danger that entails. Yet the 15-rated handling offers nothing that wasn't done more forcefully in the 18-rated Stranger by the Lake and Femme, and some of the underlying psychology struck me as rather pat. Is it not a bit insulting - or at least decidedly on the nose - that our boy should fall for daddy Tovey at precisely the moment he loses his actual father? (Are gay men this easily typified?) Granted, you might say anything is plausible in the halls and bathrooms of human desire; you might also cling to the fact there is still psychology of a kind here. In its final reel, however, Plainclothes succumbs to Sundance Lab plotting - using an incriminating letter, plucked out of nowhere, to conclusively raise the stakes - so label it a mixed bag: a film that shows promise in fits and starts, even as it begins to squander its own compelling set-up.
Plainclothes is now showing in selected cinemas.
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