Lucas (Tom Blyth) meets Andrew (Russell Tovey) in a toilet stall, someplace in New York state, someday within the 1990s. Lucas is an undercover cop, sicced repeatedly on this cruising spot to lure homosexual males into indecent publicity fees. He’s not joyful about it. Andrew brings his buried sexual curiosity brimming to the floor, and earlier than this good-looking stranger can incriminate himself, Lucas leaves the stall, Andrew’s cellphone quantity tucked in his jacket pocket.
Carmen Emmi’s fraught debut Plainclothes has the makings of a steamy, provocative thriller, however appears disinterested in meaningfully grappling with the implications of its premise. Its protagonist is painted as a guilt-ridden outcast surrounded by cartoon coppers whose prurient ardour for pinching perverts borders on homoerotic. That is the one salient jab that Plainclothes takes at Lucas’s predatory, hypermasculine milieu, which largely serves as a textural backdrop for the character’s psychosexual disquietudes.
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Lucas’s harried, anxious perspective is laced with jarring inserts shot on videotape, evoking each surveillance footage and residential movies. This formal alternative is the movie’s strongest; it enhances the frictions of Lucas’s police work and his household life, aestheticizing the proverbial rock and a arduous place in a single fell swoop. However Emmi’s imagery is discordant, haphazard, and abject, inspiring moments of unintended comedy extra typically than it stumbles upon stylistic frissons. Emmi’s formidable however overwrought type could be admirable if it weren’t disguising such a pedestrian by way of line; Plainclothes is outlined by overreaching in its construction and aesthetic, however the movie is fast to disclose its lack of thematic ambition.
Whereas the central couple flirt by way of grating bromides that beg for actors with extra convincing chemistry, Lucas bounces between home obligations. He glumly works by way of a separation along with his understanding spouse, and fends off a leeching, brutish uncle from his mom as all of them grieve the latest demise of his father (a structuring absence that haunts the proceedings like a strolling cliché). These competing strands all dovetail at a fateful New 12 months’s Get together, which performs out in fragments scattered all through the movie, lugubriously lining up the items for an explosive confrontation. This woefully miscalculated climax would really feel deflating sufficient if it weren’t preceded by ninety minutes of flaccid angst.
Plainclothes is particularly irritating as a result of its frenetic presentation and sensational state of affairs initially recommend a coherent perspective – arduous to return by within the more and more censored and commodified panorama of queer cinema. However the movie is an prolonged rebuttal to this notion, revealing its personal bids for profundity as pure posture.
