‘Plainclothes’ Review: A Closeted Cop Is Tempted by the Gay Men He’s Tailing in Steamy ’90s-Set Psychodrama
These days, gay men can arrange sex by a smartphone app as easily as ordering a pizza. But back in the ’90s, when “Plainclothes” takes place, such trysts not only had to be coordinated in person, but could be punished by arrest. Audiences of a certain age and demographic almost certainly remember the risk and fear (not to mention the illicit excitement) back then, when undercover police monitored public “tearooms” for lewd behavior. In writer-director Carmen Emmi’s “we’ve come a long way, baby” debut, the cops take it one step further, luring homosexuals into exposing themselves.
But what if the officer in question was closeted and one of these strangers slipped him his phone number? That’s the intriguing — if credulity-stretching — premise of “Plainclothes,” which casts Tom Blyth (the outlaw star of Epix’s “Billy the Kid”) as Lucas, a second-generation cop with all kinds of identity issues. He seems relatively comfortable with the assignment early on, hanging out at the shopping mall, where his job is to catch the eye of an interested stranger, follow him to the bathroom and then bust the “pervert” once he does something illegal (which, in this case, is simply flashing his wares).
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The police officers can’t speak during the process, lest the entire operation be considered entrapment. That suits Lucas fine … until he meets Andrew (“Looking” heartthrob Russell Tovey), who beckons Lucas to the last stall. Suddenly, Lucas is overwhelmed with feelings, which Emmi suggests by splicing VHS footage into the scene — a sophisticated if somewhat distracting technique for putting audiences in Lucas’ fragmented headspace.
Instead of arresting Andrew, Lucas lets him go, taking the stranger’s number and calling him to arrange a more conventional date. It’s around this time that Lucas starts to develop a conscience about arresting men for desires he shares — though he’s desperate to hide that dimension of himself from his mother (Maria Dizzia).
Emmi was but a boy in 1997, the year when “Plainclothes” is set, which makes the degree to which he successfully re-creates the atmosphere — as well as the uncertainty and paranoia — of that time rather remarkable. Gay cruising depends largely on unspoken cues: a lingering glance, an interested look back, the conspicuous adjustment of one’s “basket.” Here, such behavior is not as sexy as Drew Lint’s “M/M” or as amusing as Tsai Ming-liang’s art-house “Goodbye Dragon Inn,” and yet, it’s encouraging to see these codes re-created by a young filmmaker, who uses mirrors placed directly above a bank of urinals to let the characters’ eyes do the talking.
For Lucas, whose understanding ex-girlfriend (Amy Forsyth) is the only person he’s told of his bi-curious inclinations, the conflicted young man finally seems ready to explore his attraction to men — and he wants Andrew to be his first. “Plainclothes” presents this experimental impulse in a semi-romantic light, even though neither man can “host.” Lucas, who gives Andrew a fake name, worries what the neighbors will think, while his crush claims to be a husband and father with a high-profile job as some kind of “administrator.”
That means finding somewhere public to rendez-vous and eventually hook up — which of course exposes Lucas to the same laws he’s tasked with enforcing. Lucas’ commanding officer (John Bedford Lloyd) explains that someone who’d had oral sex in such a spot went on to molest some little girls. Now concerned citizens are demanding a crackdown, which seems like a stretch. Police have needed less reason than that to target homosexual activity, and as a training film shows, they’ve gone so far as to hide cameras behind one-way mirrors in order to discourage such behavior.
After striking out at a repertory movie palace, Andrew suggests a local park, which introduces another dimension of ’90s-era cruising Emmi must have read up on (for context, George Michael was arrested by an undercover vice cop in a Los Angeles toilet, and later outed by a British tabloid after paparazzi caught him cruising London’s Hampstead Heath). The “Plainclothes” pair have better luck, getting it on in a public greenhouse before Andrew’s beeper goes off.
To the uninitiated, when it comes to trysts between closeted men, there are all kinds of rules, both unwritten and explicit. Andrew warns Lucas that he rarely sees anyone more than once, but Lucas ignores his boundaries. The hot-blooded cop is hooked, running Andrew’s license plate through the police database and proceeding to stalk him at work — a bad idea on his part, but a satisfying one, dramatically speaking, since doing so inadvertently exposes the man Lucas had started to believe was his soulmate.
You can’t entirely blame Lucas for wanting a relationship, though toilets aren’t typically the place to find one. Surely even small-town Mansfield, Mass., has a gay bar — or else, a short drive to Boston might do the trick — but Lucas’ only exposure to gay culture is the bathroom he’s been surveilling. (It may be hard for younger audiences to imagine, but before Ellen DeGeneres came out in 1997, the media was relatively skittish about anything queer, depriving Lucas and his peers of role models or basic information.)
As impressive as Emmi’s ultra-subjective multimedia approach can be at times, the mix of formats and different timelines occasionally feels like a strategy to mislead. The film has a few major plot holes, mostly concerning the present-tense family meal where Lucas seems to be having a nervous breakdown. He can hardly contain his secret any longer, but when his uncle’s new girlfriend (Alessandra Ford Balazs) threatens to expose him, Lucas flips out, and Erik Vogt-Nilsen’s editing gets downright tortured. “Plainclothes” builds to an intense and ultimately cathartic climax, but there’s something retrograde about the shame Lucas feels. Emmi wants us to experience his protagonist’s sense of suffocation, when looking back from the presence, we just want to shout: “It gets better!”
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