Lucas (Tom Blyth) meets Andrew (Russell Tovey) in a bathroom stall, somewhere in New York state, sometime in the 1990s. Lucas is an undercover cop, sicced regularly on this cruising spot to lure gay men into indecent exposure charges. He’s not happy about it. Andrew brings his buried sexual curiosity brimming to the surface, and before this handsome stranger can incriminate himself, Lucas leaves the stall, Andrew’s phone number tucked in his jacket pocket.
Carmen Emmi’s fraught debut Plainclothes has the makings of a steamy, provocative thriller, but seems disinterested in meaningfully grappling with the implications of its premise. Its protagonist is painted as a guilt-ridden outcast surrounded by cartoon coppers whose prurient passion for pinching perverts borders on homoerotic. This is the only salient jab that Plainclothes takes at Lucas’s predatory, hypermasculine milieu, which mostly serves as a textural backdrop for the character’s psychosexual disquietudes.
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Lucas’s harried, anxious perspective is laced with jarring inserts shot on videotape, evoking both surveillance footage and home videos. This formal choice is the film’s strongest; it complements the frictions of Lucas’s police work and his family life, aestheticizing the proverbial rock and a hard place in one fell swoop. But Emmi’s imagery is discordant, haphazard, and abject, inspiring moments of unintended comedy more often than it stumbles upon stylistic frissons. Emmi’s ambitious but overwrought style would be admirable if it weren’t disguising such a pedestrian through line; Plainclothes is defined by overreaching in its structure and aesthetic, but the film is quick to reveal its lack of thematic ambition.
While the central couple flirt via grating bromides that beg for actors with more convincing chemistry, Lucas bounces between domestic obligations. He glumly works through a separation with his understanding wife, and fends off a leeching, brutish uncle from his mother as they all grieve the recent demise of his father (a structuring absence that haunts the proceedings like a walking cliché). These competing strands all dovetail at a fateful New Year’s Party, which plays out in fragments scattered throughout the film, lugubriously lining up the pieces for an explosive confrontation. This woefully miscalculated climax would feel deflating enough if it weren’t preceded by ninety minutes of flaccid angst.
Plainclothes is especially frustrating because its frenetic presentation and sensational scenario initially suggest a coherent perspective – hard to come by in the increasingly censored and commodified landscape of queer cinema. But the film is an extended rebuttal to this notion, revealing its own bids for profundity as pure posture.
