When Carmen Emmi read a 2016 article in the Los Angeles Times about a Long Beach sting operation that targeted gay men a few years earlier, it made him feel nervous.
The article brought up anxieties he experienced growing up that he didn’t realize at the time were related to his queerness. But dipping into those waters again allowed Emmi to write and direct his debut feature, “Plainclothes,” which made a huge splash at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year and is opening this weekend in Atlanta after a sold-out screening at Out On Film.
In the film, Tom Blyth plays Lucas, an undercover agent luring and arresting gay men in a mall bathroom circa 1997. While on the job, Lucas unexpectedly falls for Andrew (Russell Tovey), one of the men targeted. These feelings are new to Lucas and certainly not ones he can share with others, particularly his family.
Emmi, Blyth and Tovey recently spoke to Georgia Voice about the project.
Emmi came out a few years before he read the Los Angeles Times article. But in the aftermath of reading the article, he began to feel unstable. Instead of running from that feeling, though, he took a deeper look at where it came from and traced it back to when he was a boy in Syracuse, New York. The character of Lucas represents Emmi and his brother, as well as some of their friends.
“When I started writing this movie eight years ago, I imagined myself sitting having these dialogues,” Emmi said. “As the years progressed, he morphed to a person played by Tom [Blythe]. Lucas is struggling with anxiety and suppressing his feelings. He is looking for love and not getting the kind of love he needs. That sense of longing for connection is what he is going through.”
The character of Andrew also has his own secrets and life. Emmi wanted the character to represent how people in the queer community support and look out for each other.
“I wanted to show how Andrew is shepherding Lucas into the queer community in a loving and thoughtful way,” Emmi said. “That is what I got to experience.”
Emmi wrote a version of “Plainclothes” that was set in 2014, but realized it didn’t work because all of the characters were on their cellphones. Narratively speaking, he felt it was much easier to tell a story about discreet characters if they didn’t have automatic access to each other. Revisiting the ‘90s was very therapeutic, too.
“It was great to go back and look at that time in my life straight on,” Emmi said.
One of the reasons Emmi thinks the film works so well is the amount of love that was on the set. The cast and crew made the conscious decision to show up and support each other.
“I think it shows in the chemistry [between Blyth and Tovey] and their leadership and how that trickled down to the rest of the cast. We won the Best Ensemble Award at Sundance, and [the team] really acted as a unit,” Emmi said. “There were no egos, and that is how Russell and Tom are. Thinking, as someone who has looked up to Russell all my life, that he’d be a diva or tricky, he is not. He is genuinely an incredible person and I told him I feel so lucky to be alive in a time he was as a gay man.”
Both Blyth and Tovey were attracted to the project after reading the script.
“It felt like something I had not seen before, personal and necessary, especially right now,” Blyth said. Later, he met Emmi and fell in love with him as a human being.
“He is such an artist and visionary,” Blythe said. “I couldn’t believe this was his first feature and I was excited to be part of [it].”
An Irish-Italian police officer who comes from a lineage of cops, Lucas wants to do his family proud. His family culture is about looking after your own.
“His dad is very sick, and he wants to make him proud,” Blythe said. “All of this is underpinned by the fact that he is struggling with his own identity, denying his own reality and sexuality.”
Tovey sees Andrew as a man of a certain period in history – filled with shame, who doesn’t feel he can be his authentic self.
“He performs in the margins, and I think he is a fundamentally sad man because he cannot be who he is, and he has set up so many rules for himself,” Tovey said. “He is very compartmentalized, someone who probably tries not to think too much about life. He just exists. It’s a beautiful character to play, because he is so complex and flawed.”
Both Blythe and Tovey agree that shame is the backbone of the story. Both characters are experiencing it for the same reason in different stages of life.
“Shame is awful – and to have it carry it around is incredibly damaging mentally,” Tovey said. “Physically, it deteriorates the human body.”
Andrew sees a beacon of light in his connection with Lucas, but his rules are simple: “Once only and that is it – I cannot get involved,” Tovey said. As the relationship between the two men blossoms, however, something in Lucas allows Andrew to feel young again.
While the story felt urgent when the actors first got together with Emmi to begin shooting, it feels even more so now.
“A year later,” Blyth said, “and it feels double as urgent, sadly.”
Correction: the previous headline for this article misspelled Tom Blyth’s name as Tom Blythe. That has been corrected.
