There’s a great film somewhere in Plainclothes, Carmen Emmi’s promising if muddled feature directorial debut. Driven by compelling performances by Tom Blyth (Benediction) and Russell Tovey (Looking), this story of forbidden love has considerable emotional fire. The film, which one can continually call My Policeman if not too careful (guilty as charged!), dramatizes a true episode that happened to a member of Emmi’s family in the 1990s. Blyth stars as Lucas, an undercover policeman who entraps gay men who loiter in shopping malls in search of sex. Lucas, with his piercing eyes and twinkish frame, offers perfect jailbait. He leads follows guys to the bathroom, they whip their dicks out, and arrests are made. It’s a sad reflection of the fact that queer life lurked in the shadows long after decriminalization.
Lucas seems to be questioning himself on many levels though. When his superior pairs him with new recruit Jeff (Darius Fraser), Lucas can’t help but size up his beefy biceps—or more when they’re in the locker room. But Lucas increasingly wrestles with the ethics of his job as he struggles with his own loneliness. Although he has a girlfriend, he recognizes his marks’ hunger for intimacy and connection. Moreover, when an older man, Andrew (Tovey), catches his eye one day at work, Lucas leads him to the bathroom either for more entrapment or for new discoveries.
Lucas and Andrew dabble in a push-and-pull relationship as they navigate desires and double lives. Blyth and Tovey have blazing chemistry. Whenever they’re onscreen together, Plainclothes blisters with voracious lust for life that snuffs out the pensive melancholy that nearly suffocates them when they’re alone.
Unfortunately, though, Emmi doesn’t trust the actors to carry the film. A strange and frequently incomprehensible aesthetic fractures the timeline. Old VHS shots and surveillance videos—millisecond snips in rapid-fire montages—inject ghosts of the past into the present. These chaotic montages come at random. They punctuate the film whenever it seems to be hitting its stride. Besides offering a nod to surveillance and the clandestine nature of the men’s rendezvous, the editing jumbles the tale. It proves more alienating and distracting than effective, a first feature falter that offers a superficial tic. And an extremely annoying one at that.
Film editor Erik Vogt-Nilsen reigns it in as the film progresses. However, it’s hard to connect when Plainclothes changes gears narratively, tonally, and aesthetically. Once Lucas and Andrew part ways—an inevitability with Andrew’s insistence that he limits meet-ups with men—Lucas wrestles with love lost at family’s New Year’s party. Lucas’s family offers another bag of cats with a grieving mother (Maria Dizzia), a deadbeat homophobic uncle (Gabe Fazio), and a collective fixation on lentil soup.
The doomed party gives Blyth more room to shine, but Plainclothes ultimately becomes another ill-fated gay love story about loss, shame, and absence. The sentiment nevertheless rings true to the period of the tale. Barely more than 20 years ago, these kind of love stories didn’t have happy endings. The film’s final shots, a bravura moment for Blyth, recover the film with a message of self-love and acceptance.