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Barry Ward brings honesty and strength to this beautiful, well-produced concept Brokeback a drama about forbidden love in remote North Wales. This comes from writer-director Helen Walsh, who is rare and important in the arts: a novelist who has the same role as an original filmmaker. (His first show Lawbreakers it came out 11 years ago.)
Ward plays Jack, a troubled middle-aged man. He is too old to do the work of raising badgers; he owns this business with his controversial brother Dyfan (Celyn Jones), who resents the time Jack is out of work receiving treatment for his now terminal cancer. Jack has been with his wife Maggie (Liz White) since he was 16; they’re both worried that their son Tom (Henry Lawfull) will get into bad company and fail to support the snail business – even though they both love Tom’s smart girlfriend, Lois (a small part of Leisa Gwenllian, star of the recent Welsh language drama Effi o Blaenau).
Tom’s hoodlum friends have been threatening and harassing local fisherman Bernie (Danny Webb) with dire results; Bernie has been employing a traveling deckhand named Daniel (Lorne MacFadyen) whose chance encounter with Jack is the spark that ignites the story. The truth is that Jack is secretly gay, or bi, and the film achieves its complexity and strength by showing us this, the denial, that has been synonymous with his existence for years. She and Daniel are obviously attracted to each other, and they both know about a place to walk near a tin mine. The two men take Bernie’s small fishing boat and a passionate, glorious romance develops as they live, in the key words of the title, at sea, away from the criticism and prejudice of their community.
Interestingly, Jack’s gay identity is something that exists on a different plane than his outer self: but it is neither real nor less than the part of him that loves Maggie; although I complain about this film that the excellent Liz White was not given the opportunity to express her inner life.
