At the Toronto International Film Festival, you had to see, on Sunday, the hordes of admirers posted on King Street. The reason for their presence? The arrival in the Queen City of their idol Harry Styles, who presented the world premiere at TIFF of the film My Policeman, by Michael Grandage, which he starred. The singer turned actor plays Tom, a policeman who, in England at the end of the 1950s, hides his homosexuality, then liable to prison. After the press screening held ahead of time, Harry Styles, visibly in good spirits despite the recent controversies surrounding the other film in which he appears, Don’t Worry Darlingopened up about both his character and his motivations for joining this project.
“All the feelings that Tom has for men are a bit alien to him,” Harry Styles told a press conference after the film’s press screening.
“I see Tom as someone who grew up in a narrow world, with this idea that the end of the world was very close, but who gradually realizes that the end is further, and further still. Lots of people spend their entire lives in such bubbles. »
Based on a novel by author Bethan Roberts, My Policeman takes place in two eras: from 1957 to 1959, then in 1999. In the past, Harry Styles plays Tom, a young policeman with little education but curious. In her orbit gravitate Patrick, the young director of a local museum (David Dawson), and Marion (Emma Corrin), who is about to become a teacher — Linus Roach (revealed as a repressed gay priest in priestin 1994), Rupert Everett and Gina McKee (who steals the show) interpret the present versions.
fear and shame
Between Tom, Patrick and Marion reigns a joyful friendship, but it turns out, and the film makes no secret of it, that Tom and Patrick are in fact lovers. His “unnatural disposition” being illegal at the time, Tom decides to marry Marion, whom he loves dearly, but not with the same passion that he loves Patrick.
“Tom is a product of his time. For a gay man then, sexuality was shrouded in fear and shame. […] Despite all the complexity and the deceptive dimension of the love triangle that binds them, they share a real friendship. Tom’s love for Marion is real, and Tom’s love for Patrick is real. Besides, one of the reasons the story is so devastating is that Marion and Patrick really are friends. There is another real love there. This duality, the fact that nothing is black or white, like “you hurt me, I don’t love you anymore”, seems to me to stick more to real life. »
Obviously, the status quo is impossible, because both Tom, Patrick and Marion are suffering. The drama is brewing.
“One of the aspects that appealed to me the most was that I think most people will be able to recognize a part of themselves in each character. And I find it very beautiful. All of the characters have great qualities…and some flaws that we all hope we don’t have, but as humans we all have flaws. So people will also be able to recognize themselves on this level. It’s very human; it resonated with me. »
Off topic
The subject is strong, poignant, and must be revisited, it is obvious. Except that My Policeman is often not up to it, with its not very subtle technical and plastic choices: the present in faded colors illustrating the sadness of the characters, the flashbacks filtered in sepia “old photo” of happy days, the sequences repetitive shots from a troubled character shot to a stormy sea shot…
All this is perfectly functional, but devoid, precisely, of this passion supposed to inhabit Tom in the past tense, and which he will then repress throughout his life.
Unveiled a few days earlier, the romantic comedy Bros, one of the premieres from a major studio focused exclusively on a romantic relationship between two men, contains an almost endless amount of good lines. During the viewing of My Policemanone of them kept coming back to mind, when the character of Billy Eichner, also a screenwriter, observes about the “pivotal” Hollywood films devoted to homosexuality such as philadelphia and Brokeback Mountain : “Hollywood and straight people like to see us suffer in the cinema, we gays. »
Admittedly, this is not the fault of the film by Michael Grandage, who is himself openly gay, but the fact remains that the observation of Billy Eichner, who is also gay, is not wrong: My Policemanfor lack of a real vision, seems a bit frozen in time, like his characters from 1999.
However, after the comic and caustic electroshock of Bros, we have the impression of having moved on, or finally, of having taken a new step. Anyway, we will have the opportunity to think about it and come back to it, My Policeman coming out later this fall.
The film My Policeman will be released on October 21 and then released on the Prime Video platform on November 4