Black Church Bay, BFI London Film festival
This is a movie I expected to know everything about before I saw it, due to leaks and official trailers, but it surprised me a lot with turns in the plot and the overall feeling of the film.
The movie revolves around the deeply closeted gay teacher Barry (excellently played by Tom Cullen) and his involvement with one of his students, 17-year-old Jasper, who is the complete opposite: openly gay, proud and (from what it looks like) very confident. (Joe Locke shows us a new side of his acting here, even though we’ve seen him play young gay men before. This is different. Trust me!)
During a weekend on Barry’s boat, Jasper disappears while taking a solo nighttime dip, and Barry faces a choice: come out and tell what he knows, or stay hidden in the closet.
When the the world caches on, and fright, fear and Barry’s conscience hit him, it escalate quickly. The stress and anxiety goes through the roof. In the Q&A after the screening, Tom Cullen called it a pressure cooker for Barry, and that thing is about to explode…
Throughout the movie, there’s a wild mix of psychological drama and character studies that turns into something of a survival thriller.
Director and creator Rhys Marc Jones said in the Q&A that he wanted to add intergenerational friction to it. He stated that he knows how privileged he is to have grown up as a gay man in a certain era, and how much harder it would have been for the generation before him. But he also confessed that he’s slightly envious of the generation after him.
I believe this shines through so brilliantly in Barry and Jasper’s characters: How the times they grew up in shaped their feelings and views about being gay, and what expectations they feel society places on them. Tom, especially, makes this very visible to the viewer through Barry, starting in the opening scene. All the characters are brilliantly portrayed, but with Barry, it sometimes feels easy to understand the choices he makes, even though I’m not excusing those choices at all.
I do want to add that Black Church Bay is beautifully done. The scenery at the brickworks makes me wanna go there and explore! I wanna sit on the boat and look out over the open sea that just goes on forever, and to be in the garden with Barry and Kelly. I want to experience those beautiful surroundings.
Another brilliant thing about Black Church Bay is how it brings out laughter in the most absurd situations. You’ll see. And it’s such a refreshing relief.
In my opinion, the ending is quite open, and my friends (who I went with) and I have practically made a list of possible plots we’d like to see followed up on by now, while others I’ve talked to after seeing Black Church Bay have a very clear picture of what went down. So it’s really a different experience for different viewers.
But based on all of the above, it seems like Rhys Marc Jones’s intention stated in earlier mentioned Q&A worked: to leave the audience with questions and give us a film that lingers in our memories.