'Plainclothes's Fancy Footwork to Sidestep Cliches Only Finds Different Pitfalls

There’s a familiar and questionable trope at the heart of Plainclothes – someone exhibiting homophobic behavior or responsible for anti-LGBTQ+ violence is secretly repressing their own queerness. To writer-director Carmen Emmi’s credit, the film tries to sidestep the most egregious hallmarks of the trope, but in doing so, the recently premiered Sundance film creates a new batch of problems it’s unable to solve. Lucas (Tom Blyth) is a genial but timid closeted man in 1990s New York state, and not a textbook internalized homophobe – although he doesn’t counteract his self-denial with outbursts of bigotry, he has agreed to be a tool of the homophobic state.

Lucas spends his working hours in a local mall pretending to cruise. He courts gay men into public toilets and makes a plausibly deniable pass at them. Hence, they make the first provable move, then signal to his fellow officers to arrest them for public indecency. As police policy, it’s inhumane and criminal – a transparent method of persecuting gay men with aggressive entrapment, and American cops did it for nearly a century.

When Lucas meets Andrew (Russell Tovey), a confident, experienced older gay man, he feels a keen desire that supersedes his police protocol and pursues an ill-advised but revelatory romance. Here, the volatile strands of Plainclothes – the pressures of conformity, surveillance, and the police state – collide after coexisting under unstable but controlled conditions. The film is primarily shot in tight, intimate compositions that rarely give the sense of being surveilled, rather of nightmarish proximity, and cinematographer Ethan Palmer adds outbreaks of stark red lighting, lens flares, and projection tricks to color Emmi’s vision of a man stuck between his own truth and conservative order.