“Pretty policemen” is what they used to call the cops who entrapped gay men in public toilets. Tom Blyth plays one in Plainclothes, an old-school gay movie in many respects, set in the 1990s and all about the trials of the closeted homosexual man.
It’s intimate – human-emotions intimate rather than body-parts intimate – and if I say that Blyth’s undercover cop Lucas spends his days luring unsuspecting homosexuals into toilets, where they are apprehended once in a compromising situation, you will probably say “and then one day he falls for one of the men he’s meant to entrap”.
That is exactly what happens. And it is more or less the entire story. Though there is backstory too – of Lucas’s increasing disquiet at his fellow police officers’ rampant hostility towards homosexuals, and of Lucas’s home life in a big, extended Irish/Italian family no more tolerant of “deviants” and the like.
Andrew, the man who finally brings Lucas’s long simmering feelings to the surface, is played by Russell Tovey, who I recently saw talking about this film – passionately, which suits the subject matter. Suppressed emotions have to go somewhere, is the idea, and eventually the pressure becomes too much to handle. In the interim the lot of the closeted gay man is one of paranoia and eternal watchfulness.
Blyth is on the cusp of becoming the next big name, I suspect – 2026 is probably going to be his year – and Tovey is endlessly excellent, as he is here, as a man with passions to match Lucas’s and a background that makes exposure even more explosive. They both give superheated, intense performances as people trying to regain control of themselves.
The 1990s marked the end in most circles of the gay-as-perversion idea, and along with it the belief that homosexual men must also be paedophiles, as if it came with the territory. Blyth and Tovey’s performances catch the high stakes of being the wrong sexuality back then, and how some gay men came to terms with it better than others – Andrew knows how to play the “straight acting” game; Lucas may not be so adept.
This is the knot that the movie worries away at, eventually broadening out to examine Lucas’s emotional life in the broader sense. Relations with joshing, bantering, casually homo-baiting work colleagues, his big family – often together because his father has just died – and the girlfriend he recently broke up with, who he still has feelings for.
This is Carmen Emmi feature debut. He and his DP Ethan Palmer give the whole thing a furtive look – with woozy cameras and shifting image qualities, using old digital technologies to suggest dislocation, while the sound does impressionistic, simmering things and then suddenly locks on to some small sound, like the catch of a breath.
It’s hothouse-intimate, all suggested rather than shown, though eventually the style starts to overwhelm the content a touch. When we should be focusing on Lucas and Andrew, instead thoughts are likely to wander onto precisely which piece of 1990s kit Emmi is using to catch that old-school birthday-party-footage ambience.
There is mention of Aids, and of unprotected sex and it all comes as a bit of a shock. How far “gay” movies have moved on from those days. Then they were problem movies. Now they are more celebratory, or the sexual aspect is just part of the scenery rather than the entire story. But if we’re in the grip of a 1990s revival at the moment, which we seem to be, why shouldn’t the 1990s gay movie be revived too?
Plainclothes – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
