“My Policeman” looks at a repressed love story that fails due to a weak script, but above all due to the main roles of Harry Styles and Emma Corrin, who are only saved by the interpretation of David Dawson.
LGBT+ cinema has hosted numerous films about the impossibility of loving another person of the same gender without being judged for it. Most of these films convey to the audience a wave of devastating emotions in the face of suppression of love and restrictions on the expression of feelings., which can be so common for other people. IN My cop Something different happens with the performances of Michael Grandage Harry Styles and Emma Corrin.
With the film adaptation of the novel of the same name by Bethan Roberts, Grandage intends to portray these same emotions during 1950s England, when homosexuality was still illegal and condemned by a homophobic society.but the cast, perhaps the most attractive element for viewers, is one of the points that weakens the film to convey what its author proposes.
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My cop introduces us to the love trio of Tom Burgess, played by Harry Styles, who recently appeared on Don’t worry honeyMarion Taylor (Emma Corrin) and Patrick Hazlewood (David Dawson), but mostly deals with the internal conflicts and moral dilemmas of its protagonista police officer named Tom, who refuses to accept his homosexuality in the face of the social environment of the time.
Marion, Tom’s supposed romantic interest, loses relevance as soon as Patrick appears on screen; certainly the three share friendly sequences that resemble the famous love trio in the Jules and Jim Francois Truffaut, with the difference that Marion quickly becomes jealous of her partner, and then the director completely loses focus on the female character in the story.
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Although the biggest part My cop is dedicated to revealing the socio-affective relationships between Tom and Patrick, the love between these two characters gets a rather ephemeral treatment; the director loses track of who to devote more development to and ends up not handling any of the characters well, leaving a half-finished drama with an extremely indifferent ending.
IN Maurice James Ivory, starring Hugh Grant as Clive Durham, we see a trial for the crime of homosexuality and perversion where the actor’s facial expressions tell how upset the character is at witnessing his possible fate; in My copthe central axis of the scenario lies in the illegality of being with a person of the same sexbut his treatment is so empty that it is lost among the comings and goings of the present and flashes.
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The memories written in the diaries are far more interesting than the present of the film, which takes place during the nineties of the last century and shows us Tom, Patrick and Marion as elderly beings who cannot face their past and accept its reality. The cast playing mature characters live up to their performance but contribute nothing more than what they are assigned.
Instead, something completely different happens with the main actors. It is David Dawson who saves the ship from sinking, but does not save it from becoming a major disaster.. While Dawson delivers a warm and relatable performance as a gay man who feels united with his identity; Corrin and Styles feel out of place and don’t transfer any of their own emotions to their characters’ emotions.
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Even on their love plane, the love that Tom declares to have for Marion is not visible. On one hand, the successful British singer gives a stiff but straight performance, ill-prepared to portray the repressed emotions of a gay man in the 50s; on the other, an actress Crown fails to convince the viewer of the huge impression that falls on Marion when she learns about the true sexual orientation of her new husband.
Although My cop tries to show an intimate view of the difficulties that men go through in the struggle with their masculinityGrandage deals with the subject superficially, missing an opportunity to create a rawer and tougher portrait of one of the most unloved professions, which hides its workers behind a facade of integrity and a uniform symbol of what is right.
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Far from suggesting something different from the dramas of LGBT+ cinema, My cop it stagnates in a story that has been seen many times before, but without as much power; favoring a redundant perspective that prefers to present the pretty faces of its cast rather than the complex emotions its protagonists deal with.