My Policeman, now on Amazon Prime Video, is curiously enough the second Harry Styles film released this year, set in the Fifties, in which the plot involves him keeping a major secret from his wife. (The first is Don’t Worry Darling, in case you were wondering.) Styles is Brightonian cop Tom Burgess, who first strikes up a friendship with, then finds himself falling for museum curator Patrick Hazlewood (David Dawson). Painfully aware of the law’s stance on homosexuality even as he struggles to make sense of his own feelings — “What is happening to me?” he asks himself, distraught after their first romantic encounter — Tom marries teacher Marion Taylor (Emma Corrin) to keep up appearances. It’s a safe, comfortable marriage, even if defined by an awkward courtship and lacklustre sex that director Michael Grandage contrasts against the uninhibited passion Tom and Patrick demonstrate in private.
The film, based on Bethan Roberts’ 2012 novel of the same name, cuts between the Fifties and the Nineties, tracing the repercussions of a single lie over time. Parts of My Policeman play out predictably, its inherent sadness and framing as a lament for lost time placing it squarely in the tradition of Tragic Gay films, in which queer people’s stories are tied to their trauma. Yet there’s a yearning and sensuality to the film that render it so magnetic.
Grandage has worked as theatre director since 1996. My Policeman is his second feature film after Genius (2016), a biopic of American editor Max Perkins that starred Colin Firth, Jude Law and Nicole Kidman. He spoke about drawing inspiration from Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959), deciding how explicit he wanted the sex scenes to be and casting Styles.
What I love about My Policeman is that it’s a story that’s told through hands — hands clasped together reassuringly, the closeup of a wedding ring during a betrayal of marriage vows, hands intertwined in pleasure. What prompted you to tell this story through this recurring motif?
It was a very strong theme that I wanted to bring in. I think the film could almost be subtitled ‘Sensuality and Touch’, because touch is so important — whether it’s that very first touch of the neck that Tom gives Patrick or whether it is the ritualistic washing that the older Marion does for older Patrick, or the touch of marble that happens when they’re close to the monument, or even the touch of a hand on a cigarette, or certainly, as you say, the intimate touch of flesh. It’s about trying to express the emotional narrative of the film wherever possible, without necessarily having words all the time. You can quite often do it through visuals, that’s the beauty of doing anything that is dramatic. The hand was a very strong visual for me, and through it, I wanted to explore even tenseness or the tension that happens sometimes between Marion and Tom.