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Plainclothes

Country: United States, Language: English, 92 mins

Director: Carmen Emmi
Writer: Carmen Emmi
Producer: Colby Cote, April Kelley, Arthur Landon, Vanessa Pantley, Eric Podwall, Alexander Wenger

CGiii Comment

This is intimate, intense, immersive filmmaking.

Agents provocateur [aka 'the pretty police'], internalized homophobia, callous entrapment and wrecked lives...Carmen Emmi juggles some hefty balls for his feature debut. He doesn't miss a trick and he doesn't make a slip.

It's the early 90s, no internet, no hook-up apps, not a cell phone in sight...closets and cottages were a way of life for many gay men...a brief encounter to assuage the need, with phenomenal risk involved. 'Need' has the power to skew the strictest of moral compasses...and, when that happens, the self-hating, hypocritical, homophobic homosexual rears his handsome face...the mutinies of these such men are incredulous...but, when practiced in the arenas of conviction and conversion - they become monsters!

Ay, there's the rub...Carmen Emmi does not take that easy route to vilification. Condemnation is too easy...instead, he closes in on his characters...and, in doing so, creates an intimacy that will have your heart a-pumping, your breath a-gasping. It's a masterwork.

A highly stylised, bitter-sweet, multi-layered masterwork.

Trailer...

The(ir) Blurb...

A promising undercover officer assigned to lure and arrest gay men defies orders when he falls in love with a target.

Plainclothes is brimming with an atmosphere of paranoia and anxiety. As Lucas, a young police officer contending with a secret attraction to men, Tom Blyth palpably embodies this tension in a breakout performance. Straining to fill a prescribed role in the implicitly straight culture of the police force, he carries the crushing weight of both the consequences of his increasingly fraught undercover work as well as the threat of exposure of his exhilarating, clandestine encounters with Andrew (Russell Tovey). Writer-director Carmen Emmi, making his feature directorial debut, cleverly deploys lo-fi VHS footage at key moments to ramp up the sense of unease, alternately signifying the police surveillance that haunts his conscience as well as flashes of memory. A shrewd play with chronology similarly keeps the audience on its toes, wondering if Lucas will be able to handle the stress of his secret or if he’ll finally reach a breaking point.—Basil Tsiokos