Friday, October 27, 2017

The Gods Are Alright

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Two men walk through a literal hellscape - the grass is on fire around them. The sky is bleak, slate gray as a slab of concrete turned up and hoisted in place of the stars. Muck coats everything beneath the knees. One man turns to the other man and he says, all of a sudden, "I think this place is beautiful."

And suddenly it is beautiful. Like that. Yellow tablecloths and flowers appear, the sun peeks around the bare tree branches. What was sullen and ashy-flavored finds its heartbeat, a thrum - mud becomes earth, warm with possibility and life.

It's impossible, what love can do to us - an invisible shift in the architecture of everything, like somebody found a switch and turned all the atoms on at once. We might short-circuit for a minute, not sure what to do with all of that energy - it's the finding of new muscles inside of ourselves, and we wobble like newborn lambs looking for footing at first.

God's Own Country - a masterpiece of tactility, rough hands rubbing soft underbellies - captures all of this. Johnny (Josh O'Connor) is just a closed-off cow-runner chasing himself off a cliff before Gheorghe (Alec Secareanu), a miracle man out of no less than Transylvania itself, appears - who knows where they come from, flung out of space. When they're there, sudden human flesh in your hands, you lose sight of the before and the after - now, ripe and flush-faced, available for touching, that is our everything. That is enough, for now.

And so magic blooms in unexpected places, on a granite hilltop against an overcast sky, seeding the scattered patches of dirt. It isn't easy living, but is can be easier. And goodness, kindness, spreads like a spring breeze up from the valleys, warming even the most insistent hardscrabble spells. Watch what grows when you dig your fingertips into the soil and give it a real good old-fashioned go. You will surprise even yourself.
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3 comments:

Anonymous said...

"Flung out of space": I see what you did there (and I approve. Very much).

Carl said...

Dammit. This was so well-written. Makes me want to see God's Own Country even more, which I didn't think was possible.

Daniel said...

I loved this film so much, and reading this made me see it in a totally different, equally amazing, way. Thank you so much for this, and all the rest of your beautiful writing, Jason!