One day, someone is going to make a film about a cop who goes undercover and doesn’t get too close to the people he’s spying on and doesn’t start questioning his own identity and life choices. Until that day comes, here’s Carmen Emmi’s drama about a cop in early 90s New York who is part of an entrapment team at a suburban shopping mall prosecuting gay men who cruise the bathrooms (a type of police work that you might think went out in the era of Alan Turing).
Tom Blyth plays Lucas, an undercover officer suffering from depression after the death of his dad and breakup with his girlfriend to whom he confessed having feelings for men; his nervous unease is not made any easier by a loudmouthed homophobic uncle at family gatherings. The movie is interspersed with Lucas’s anxiety-flash glimpses of his own life, significantly shot in the same dull, flat analogue video that the cops use to record incriminating evidence of their suspects in the toilets from a concealed camera. Video is endowed with the texture of shame and this is how Lucas subconsciously sees the dangerous truth about himself. In the course of his work, he falls for a gentle, intelligent older guy called Andrew, played by Russell Tovey, that he is supposed to be arresting. But just as poor Lucas realises that he is in love, he realises also that for Andrew he is just another ephemeral encounter.
Plainclothes is heartfelt in many ways, but burdened with a colossally melodramatic ending connected with a very elaborate plot twist around a misunderstanding, like something from a 19th-century novel, concerning a lost or indeed purloined letter, the existence of which is not entirely plausible, considering that its author is supposedly anxious not to maintain contact with Lucas. An interesting, but flawed work.
• Plainclothes is in UK cinemas from 10 October.
